Design Exposition Discussion Documents for Rich Design Discourse in Applied Visualization.

We present and report on Design Exposition Discussion Documents (DExDs), a new means of fostering collaboration between visualization designers and domain experts in applied visualization research. DExDs are a collection of semi-interactive web-based documents used to promote design discourse: to communicate new visualization designs, and their underlying rationale, and to elicit feedback and new design ideas. Developed and applied during a four-year visual data analysis project in criminal intelligence, these documents enabled a series of visualization re-designs to be explored by crime analysts remotely - in a flexible and authentic way. The DExDs were found to engender a level of engagement that is qualitatively distinct from more traditional methods of feedback elicitation, supporting the kind of informed, iterative and design-led feedback that is core to applied visualization research. They also offered a solution to limited and intermittent contact between analyst and visualization researcher and began to address more intractable deficiencies, such as social desirability-bias, common to applied visualization projects. Crucially, DExDs conferred to domain experts greater agency over the design process - collaborators proposed design suggestions, justified with design knowledge, that directly influenced the re-redesigns. We provide context that allows the contributions to be transferred to a range of settings.

Using interactive visual reasoning to support sense-making: implications for design.

This research aims to develop design guidelines for systems that support investigators and analysts in the exploration and assembly of evidence and inferences. We focus here on the problem of identifying candidate 'influencers' within a community of practice. To better understand this problem and its related cognitive and interaction needs, we conducted a user study using a system called INVISQUE (INteractive Visual Search and QUery Environment) loaded with content from the ACM Digital Library. INVISQUE supports search and manipulation of results over a freeform infinite 'canvas'. The study focuses on the representations user create and their reasoning process. It also draws on some pre-established theories and frameworks related to sense-making and cognitive work in general, which we apply as a 'theoretical lenses' to consider findings and articulate solutions. Analysing the user-study data in the light of these provides some understanding of how the high-level problem of identifying key players within a domain can translate into lower-level questions and interactions. This, in turn, has informed our understanding of representation and functionality needs at a level of description which abstracts away from the specifics of the problem at hand to the class of problems of interest. We consider the study outcomes from the perspective of implications for design.

Anticonvulsant hypersensitivity syndrome presenting as aseptic meningitis.

Anticonvulsant hypersensitivity syndrome (AHS) is a rare, potentially life-threatening drug reaction which usually occurs after exposure to aromatic antiepileptics. AHS secondary to non-aromatic antiepileptics is even more rare and there are only few case reports of AHS presenting as aseptic meningitis. We present the case of a 48-year-old patient who presented with meningism within 3 weeks of adding lamotrigine for control of her juvenile myoclonic epilepsy. When lamotrigine was restarted 2 weeks later she developed similar but more severe symptoms which resolved on stopping lamotrigine. Our patient was subsequently rendered seizure free on levetiracetam which has not so far been linked with this syndrome. It is important to be aware of this life-threatening complication associated with the use of antiepileptics.