Embellishments Revisited: Perceptions of Embellished Visualisations Through the Viewer's Lens.

Embellishments are features commonly used in everyday visualisations which are demonstrated to enhance assimilation and memorability. Despite their popularity, little is known about their impact on enticing readers to explore visualisations. To address this gap, we conducted 18 interviews with a diverse group of participants who were consumers of news media but non-experts in visualisation and design. Participants were shown ten embellished and plain visualisations collected from the news and asked to rank them based on enticement and ease of understanding. Extending prior work, our interview results suggest that visualisations with multiple embellishment types might make a visualisation perceived as more enticing. An important finding from our study is that the widespread of certain embellishments in the media might have made them part of visualisation conventions, making a visualisation appear more objective but less enticing. Based on these findings, we ran a follow-up online user study showing participants variations of the visualisations with multiple embellishments to isolate each embellishment type and investigate its effect. We found that variations with salient embellishments were perceived as more enticing. We argue that to unpack the concept of embellishments; we must consider two factors: embellishment saliency and editorial styles. Our study contributes concept and design considerations to the literature concerned with visualisation design for non-experts in visualisation and design.

Communicating Uncertainty in Digital Humanities Visualization Research.

Due to their historical nature, humanistic data encompass multiple sources of uncertainty. While humanists are accustomed to handling such uncertainty with their established methods, they are cautious of visualizations that appear overly objective and fail to communicate this uncertainty. To design more trustworthy visualizations for humanistic research, therefore, a deeper understanding of its relation to uncertainty is needed. We systematically reviewed 126 publications from digital humanities literature that use visualization as part of their research process, and examined how uncertainty was handled and represented in their visualizations. Crossing these dimensions with the visualization type and use, we identified that uncertainty originated from multiple steps in the research process from the source artifacts to their datafication. We also noted how besides known uncertainty coping strategies, such as excluding data and evaluating its effects, humanists also embraced uncertainty as a separate dimension important to retain. By mapping how the visualizations encoded uncertainty, we identified four approaches that varied in terms of explicitness and customization. This work contributes with two empirical taxonomies of uncertainty and it's corresponding coping strategies, as well as with the foundation of a research agenda for uncertainty visualization in the digital humanities. Our findings further the synergy among humanists and visualization researchers, and ultimately contribute to the development of more trustworthy, uncertainty-aware visualizations.

Implicit Error, Uncertainty and Confidence in Visualization: An Archaeological Case Study.

While we know that the visualization of quantifiable uncertainty impacts the confidence in insights, little is known about whether the same is true for uncertainty that originates from aspects so inherent to the data that they can only be accounted for qualitatively. Being embedded within an archaeological project, we realized how assessing such qualitative uncertainty is crucial in gaining a holistic and accurate understanding of regional spatio-temporal patterns of human settlements over millennia. We therefore investigated the impact of visualizing qualitative implicit errors on the sense-making process via a probe that deliberately represented three distinct implicit errors, i.e., differing collection methods, subjectivity of data interpretations and assumptions on temporal continuity. By analyzing the interactions of 14 archaeologists with different levels of domain expertise, we discovered that novices became more actively aware of typically overlooked data issues and domain experts became more confident of the visualization itself. We observed how participants quoted social factors to alleviate some uncertainty, while in order to minimize it they requested additional contextual breadth or depth of the data. While our visualization did not alleviate all uncertainty, we recognized how it sparked reflective meta-insights regarding methodological directions of the data. We believe our findings inform future visualizations on how to handle the complexity of implicit errors for a range of user typologies and for highly data-critical application domains such as the digital humanities.

Data Badges: Making an Academic Profile Through a DIY Wearable Physicalization.

In this pictorial, we present the design and making process of Data Badges as they were deployed during a one-week academic seminar. Data Badges are customizable physical conference badges that invite participants to make their own independent and personalized expressions of their academic profile by choosing and assembling a collection of predefined physical tokens on a flat wearable canvas. As our modular and intuitive design approach allows the construction to occur as a shared, collective activity, Data Badges take advantage of the creative, affective, and social values that underlie physicalization and its construction to engage participants in reflecting on personal data. Among other unexpected phenomena, we noticed how the freedom of assembly and interpretation encouraged a variety of appropriations, which expanded its intended representational space from fully representative to more resistive and provocative forms of data expression.