Open Access

Through a design study, we develop an approach to data exploration that utilizes elastic visualizations designed to support varying degrees of detail and abstraction. Examining the notions of scalability and elasticity in interactive visualizations, we introduce a visualization of personal reading traces such as marginalia or markings inside the reference library of German realist author Theodor Fontane. To explore such a rich and extensive collection, meaningful visual forms of abstraction and detail are as important as the transitions between those states. Following a growing research interest in the role of fluid interactivity and animations between views, we are particularly interested in the potential of carefully designed transitions and consistent representations across scales. The resulting prototype addresses humanistic research questions about the interplay of distant and close reading with visualization research on continuous navigation along several granularity levels, using scrolling as one of the main interaction mechanisms. In addition to presenting the design process and resulting prototype, we present findings from a qualitative evaluation of the tool, which suggest that bridging between distant and close views can enhance exploration, but that transitions between views need to be crafted very carefully to facilitate comprehension.

With relational perspectives, we examine the potential of traversing cultural collections along the richness of individual facets and relations through the process of developing an exploration-centered visualization. Cultural collections can contain thousands of artifacts, of which each typically possesses a diverse set of properties and individual facets constituting a unique relationship to the rest of the collection. Therefore, to create an appropriate representation of the complex data of each underlying artifact, oftentimes, it is not only interesting to get an overview of the entire collection from one perspective, but to explore the specific context of an artifact and the various relations it may have to other items. To investigate the potential of relational perspectives, we selected an art collection as a particularly promising case study. By following and reporting from a collaborative and iterative design process with an art museum, we developed a web interface that contrasts a collection overview with three situated visualizations each exposing a different kind of relational perspective on the art collection from an artifact.

We propose the philosophical notion of the fold as an evocative vocabulary for the design and critique of interactive data visualizations. An expanding range of application areas, such as digital art history and literary studies, illustrates the potential of data visualization for research and education in the humanities. Coinciding with the increasing currency of data as evidence in the humanities, this research addresses a growing interest in data visualization for visual analysis and argumentation. For example, cultural collection visualizations promise a range of possibilities for visual and interactive representations of digital cultural heritage, used both for free exploration and focused research. Based on the concept of the fold, prominently advanced by Gilles Deleuze, this paper outlines a critical framework that draws attention towards the complexity of the underlying data. The fold offers a way to analyze and conceptualize visualizations through the lens of three integrated operations: explication, implication, and complication. It is an opportunity to think of interactive visualizations as portals into coherent, elastic, and ultimately infinite information spaces. Accordingly, it rejects the separation between interactivity and visual encoding and draws attention to the transitions between multiple states of a visualization. We identify design patterns of the fold in data visualizations, devise a framework for the critical interpretation of interactivity in data visualization, and demonstrate the implications for the digital humanities.

Complexity is often seen as a inherent negative in information design, with the job of the designer being to reduce or eliminate complexity, and with principles like Tufte's “data-ink ratio” or “chartjunk” to operationalize mimimalism and simplicity in visualizations. However, in this position paper, we call for a more expansive view of complexity as a design material, like color or texture or shape: an element of information design that can be used in many ways, many of which are beneficial to the goals of using data to understand the world around us. We describe complexity as a phenomenon that occurs not just in visual design but in every aspect of the sensemaking process, from data collection to interpretation. For each of these stages, we present examples of ways that these various forms of complexity can be used (or abused) in visualization design. We ultimately call on the visualization community to build a more nuanced view of complexity, to look for places to usefully integrate complexity in multiple stages of the design process, and, even when the goal is to reduce complexity, to look for the non-visual forms of complexity that may have otherwise been overlooked.