After decades of digitization, large cultural heritage collections have emerged on the web, which contain massive stocks of content from galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. This increase in digital cultural heritage data promises new modes of analysis and increased levels of access for academic scholars and casual users alike. Going beyond the standard representations of search-centric and grid-based interfaces, a multitude of approaches has recently started to enable visual access to cultural collections, and to explore them as complex and comprehensive information spaces by the means of interactive visualizations. In contrast to conventional web interfaces, we witness a widening spectrum of innovative visualization types specially designed for rich collections from the cultural heritage sector. This new class of information visualizations gives rise to a notable diversity of interaction and representation techniques while lending currency and urgency to a discussion about principles such as serendipity, generosity, and criticality in connection with visualization design. With this survey, we review information visualization approaches to digital cultural heritage collections and reflect on the state of the art in techniques and design choices. We contextualize our survey with humanist perspectives on the field and point out opportunities for future research.

Wie sieht die Zukunft der Recherche in digitalen Bibliothekskatalogen aus? Wie können umfangreiche und heterogene Sammlungsbestände mit Hilfe von Datenvisualisierungen besser zugänglich gemacht werden? Kann man durch eine digitale Bibliothek flanieren und dabei den Bestand auf ganz neue Art entdecken? Diese Fragen standen im Zentrum eines Forschungsprojekts, das ein interdisziplinäres Team von Forscherinnen und Forschern des Urban Complexity Lab der FHP im vergangenen Jahr in Kooperation mit der DNB durchgeführt hat. Dieser Artikel stellt das Hauptergebnis des Projekts vor: DNBVIS, der Prototyp eines experimentellen Kataloginterfaces. Anschließend werden die Vorgehensweise und wichtigsten Erkenntnisse des Projekts zusammengefasst.

Das Versprechen hinter Digitalisierungsprojekten in sammelnden Institutionen ist oft die Erweiterung des Zugangs zum kulturellen Erbe, sei es für die Forschung oder im Sinne der Vermittlung. Bei kritischer Betrachtung fast aller Benutzerschnittstellen für Sammlungen scheint es aber an Ansätzen zu fehlen, reichhaltige Informationsräume einladend bereitzustellen. Diese Diskrepanz zwischen Digitalisierung von Sammlungen und ihrer digitalen Verfügbarmachung lässt sich dadurch begründen, dass Kultureinrichtungen selten über die nötige Kapazität verfügen, eigenständig Benutzerschnittstellen zu konzipieren und umzusetzen. Die Zielstellung des dreijährigen Forschungsprojektes Visualisierung kultureller Sammlungen (VIKUS) an der Fachhochschule Potsdam1 war die Erforschung graphischer Benutzerschnittstellen zur explorativen Sichtung von Kulturobjekten. Im Projekt wurden in Kooperation mit Kultur- und Technologiepartnern Erkenntnisse zur visuellen Exploration digitalisierter Sammlungen gewonnen (Glinka et al. 2017a), die Entwicklung nachhaltiger Technologielösungen behandelt (Glinka et al. 2017b) und in experimentellen Settings kritisch-generative Methoden erprobt. Zu letzterem zählt die Übertragung der Forschungsfragen in den Kontext eines interdisziplinären Lehrformats, welches wir in unserem Beitrag diskutieren. Wir gehen insbesondere auf den produktiven Zusammenhang zwischen Kritik und Konzeption von Informationsvisualisierungen ein und zeigen auf, welche Potenziale ein bewusster Bruch mit disziplinären Konventionen und Sehgewohnheiten mit sich bringt.

As cultural institutions are digitizing their artifacts and interlinking their collections, new opportunities emerge to engage with cultural heritage. However, it is the often comprehensive and complex nature of collections that can make it difficult to grasp their distribution and extent across a variety of dimensions. After a brief introduction to the research area of collection visualizations, this paper presents a design study visualizing an aggregated collection from diverse cultural institutions in Germany. We detail our iterative design process leading to prototypical implementations of four stylistically and functionally coordinated visualizations, each one focusing on different facets of the collection.

Personal and subjective perceptions of urban space have been a focus of various research projects in the area of cartography, geography, and related fields such as urban planning. This paper illustrates how personal georeferenced activity data can be used in algorithmic modelling of certain aspects of mental maps and custom- ised spatial visualisations. The technical implementation of the algorithm is accompanied by a preliminary study which evaluates the performance of the algorithm. As a linking element between per- sonal perception, interpretation, and depiction of space and the field of cartography and geography, we include perspectives from artistic practice and cultural theory. By developing novel visualisation concepts based on personal data, the paper in part mitigates the challenges presented by user modelling that is, amongst others, used in LBS applications.

With the proliferation of personal and social computing there is an increased interest in the field of human-computer interaction to support people’s memory practises. Yet, there is only a limited understanding of the role of artefacts in the social dynamics in memory. With memory dialogue, we introduce a methodology for exploring artefact-based memory sharing. Participants created physical or digital memory artefacts, exchanged them, and reflected on the process. Our qualitative findings show how this method can help uncover the complexity of shared memory. Participants largely chose bonding experiences and created artefacts as conversation starters about differences in their memories.

Museums are broadening their program beyond the physical institutions by providing digital collections online. In digital collections, objects are prepared and presented particularly for the Web and the ambition is to provide the entirety of a physical collection. To make these rich and comprehensive data sets accessible, an explore mode is increasingly offered. The present study considers this mode, first by making sense of the term “exploration” and suggesting four functional principles in support of exploration in digital collections — view, movement, contextualization, and participation. On this basis, we compare eight well-known museums with regard to the explore modes for their digital collections. We have devised a three-part methodology, reverse information architecture, to address the question: How is the function of exploration manifested in the structure and interface elements of digital collections? With this unique method we use the given content to investigate how far the four principles are implemented in explore modes of digital collections and, broadly said, how explorable they are. The introduced approach to studying digital collections could be opened up to other fields to analyze a variety of Web interfaces in general.

Die Entwicklung digitaler Werkzeuge lässt sich als wichtiger Teilbereich in den Digital Humanities identifizieren (Davis und Kräutli 2015; Schnapp et al. 2009). Entsprechende Forschung und Projektarbeit steht dabei komplexen Herausforderungen gegenüber. Nicht nur die Frage nach verfügbaren Daten, methodologischer Fundierung und technologischer Umsetzbarkeit, sondern auch die Frage nach deren langfristigen Verfügbarmachung sind wiederkehrende Themen der letzten Jahre. Eine zentrale Rolle für die Sicherstellung von Qualität und Anwendbarkeit der digitalen Werkzeuge ist die Einbindung von Forscher_innen der jeweiligen geisteswissenschaftlichen Disziplinen im Entwicklungsprozess (Drucker 2013). Gleichzeitig lässt sich die zentrale Bedeutung von Interfacedesign, Nutzungsanleitungen und Benutzerfreundlichkeit als wichtige Faktoren für die Etablierung von digitalen Werkzeugen im Forschungsprozess feststellen (Gibbs und Owens 2012). Doch selbst wenn diese Herausforderungen bewältigt werden und ein digitales Werkzeug (erfolgreich) entwickelt wurde, stellt sich weiterhin die Frage, wie die langfristige Nachnutzung im Sinne einer digitalen Nachhaltigkeit sichergestellt werden kann. Am Beispiel des Entstehungsprozesses einer sammlungsspezifischen Visualisierung und deren Weiterentwicklung zu einem nachnutzbaren Werkzeug werden einige zentrale Aspekte der beeinflussenden Faktoren und Lösungsansätze vorgestellt. Unser Beitrag stellt sich somit der Frage, wie sichergestellt werden kann, dass digitale Tools auch über die Laufzeit von Förderprojekten hinaus (und unabhängig von spezifischen Use-cases) dauerhaft nutzbar und weiterentwickelbar sind.

Museen erweitern ihr Vermittlungsangebot immer mehr über die physische Einrichtung hinaus, u.a. durch die Bereitstellung Digitaler Sammlungen im Web. Digitale Sammlungen zeichnen sich dadurch aus, dass die in ihnen gezeigten Objekte speziell für das Web aufbereitet und präsentiert werden. Der Anspruch besteht dabei darin, die Gesamtheit der musealen Sammlungen zur Verfügung zu stellen. Um diese umfassenden Datensätze zugänglich und ein Schlendern durch die Bestände zu ermöglichen, wird innerhalb der Digitalen Sammlungen zunehmend ein sogenannter Explore-Modus angeboten. Auf der Basis einer Untersuchung des Begriffes der Exploration wurden im Rahmen dieser Arbeit acht bekannte Museen im Hinblick auf die Explore-Modi ihrer Digitalen Sammlungen miteinander verglichen und analysiert. Es wurde eine dreiteilige Methode mit dem Namen Reverse Information Architecture entwickelt, um die folgende Frage zu beantworten: Wie manifestiert sich die Funktion der Exploration in der Struktur und den Interface-Elementen der Digitalen Sammlungen? Mit der entwickelten Methode wird der Inhalt der Websites analysiert, um zu untersuchen, inwiefern Konzepte der Exploration in den Digitalen Sammlungen umgesetzt werden.

This work is part of ongoing research on the visualization of spatial relationships in fictional works. Our aim is to arrive at aesthetic representations of fictional narratives set in actual places such as cities. Novel City Maps offers two map views, one inspired by transit maps and the other by conventional street maps. The former uses the aesthetic of abstract transit maps to reveal the co-occurrence structures between important places in a story. The street map view is designed as a spatial fingerprint of a novel by highlighting the places occurring often in the story.

In this paper we examine the concept of staged analysis through a case study on visualizing urban mobility exhibited in a public gallery space. Recently, many cities introduced bike-sharing in order to promote cycling among locals and visitors. We explore how citizens can be guided from evocative impressions of bicycling flows to comparative analysis of three bike-sharing systems. The main aim for visualizations in exhibition contexts is to encourage a shift from temporary interest to deeper insight into a complex phenomenon. To pursue this ambition we introduce cf. city flows, a comparative visualization environment of urban bike mobility designed to help citizens casually analyze three bike-sharing systems in the context of a public exhibition space. Multiple large screens show the space of flows in bike-sharing for three selected world cities: Berlin, London, and New York. Bike journeys are represented in three geospatial visualizations designed to be progressively more analytical, from animated trails to small-multiple glyphs. In this paper, we describe our design concept and process, the exhibition setup, and discuss some of the insights visitors gained while interacting with the visualizations.

In this article we present a case study on digital representation of the art historical research and metadata brought together for a scientific collection catalogue by the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg. The resulting interface aims at linking the structure and texture of a collection of drawings by Frederick William IV of Prussia (1795–1861) with additional contextual information. The article describes the context of the larger research project and presents the resulting visualization and interaction techniques specifically designed for dynamic exploration along time and subjects.

Culturegraphy visualizes the exchange of cultural information over time. Treating cultural works as nodes and influences as directed edges the visualization of these cultural networks can provide new insights into the rich interconnections of cultural development such as movie references. All findings were made in a process that involved network scientists, a media theorist, and a sociologist. The role that visualization can play in bridging scientific communities was central to this work. In this sense, the resulting visualizations were process to bring researchers from different disciplines together. Traditionally using different methods, physicists increasingly ask similar questions as media theorists or sociologists as they study the dynamics in networks. Visualization can serve as a common language that brings fields together, shows differences, but also has its own idiosyncratic views.

Das computergestützte Extrahieren und Visualisieren von Emotionen in Texten ist eine etablierte Technik des “Distant Reading”. Die generelle Stimmung eines Textes kann schnell erfasst werden ohne den gesamten Text lesen zu müssen. Da Emotionen sehr komplex und die Eigenschaften zwischen verschiedenen Emotionen fließend sind, ist die visuelle Charakterisierung von Emotionen schwierig. Wir stellen Emosaic vor, ein Online-Tool welches Emotionen aus benutzerdefinierten Texten filtert und durch systematische und nachvollziehbare Farbumwandlung zur Exploration und Analyse innerhalb einer interaktiven Visualisierung bereitstellt. Die durch drei Dimensionen beschreibbaren Emotionen werden dabei in klar definierte Farbparameter übersetzt. Ein von uns entwickelter öffentlich zugänglicher Web-Prototyp zeigt anhand interaktiver Visualisierungen erste Analyse- und Explorationsmöglichkeiten dieser Methode (http://emosaic.de).

We present “archival liveness” as a concept in design and the Digital Humanities and describe its development within a Research Through Design process. Working with a newly acquired archive of contemporary poetry we produced designs that both manifested and “geared in to” [Durrant 2011] [Gurwitsch 1979] the temporal rhythms of the work and infrastructure of archiving. Drawing on user-centred work with participants, often poets themselves, we focused on marginalia as a material feature of the archive, developing a drawing machine and live Twitter bot. Our work addresses institutional concerns for outreach and engagement while also acknowledging and exploiting the inevitably incomplete or live character of archival collections. For designers working with digital archives, we demonstrate the pragmatic and critical value of liveness as a focus of the design process.

Im Rückgriff auf Ausstellungspraktiken im Museum stellt der Artikel Bezüge zwischen Erkenntnissen aus der Visualisierungsforschung und der Rezeption von Museumssammlungen in einem Ausstellungsdisplay her. Besondere Beachtung finden hierbei Makro- und Mikroperspektiven auf Sammlungen und Darstellungen im (digitalen) Display eines Museums. Visualisierungen können einen offenen und explorativen Zugang zu den digitalisierten Beständen bieten, der eher den Ausstellungs- und Vermittlungsaktivitäten des Museums entspricht oder diese ergänzt. Dabei werden die Potenziale der digitalen Präsentation herausgearbeitet und Anhand von Use Cases aus der Forschung illustriert, welche Ansätze in der facettierten und „kuratierten“ Inszenierung von Sammlungen umgesetzt werden können.

We introduce a set of integrated interaction techniques to interpret and interrogate dimensionality-reduced data. Projection techniques generally aim to make a high-dimensional information space visible in form of a planar layout. However, the meaning of the resulting data projections can be hard to grasp. It is seldom clear why elements are placed far apart or close together and the inevitable approximation errors of any projection technique are not exposed to the viewer. Previous research on dimensionality reduction focuses on the efficient generation of data projections, interactive customisation of the model, and comparison of different projection techniques. There has been only little research on how the visualization resulting from data projection is interacted with. We propose a set of interactive visualization methods to examine the dimensionality-reduced data as well as the projection itself. The methods let viewers see approximation errors, question the positioning of elements, compare them to each other, and visualize the influence of data dimensions on the projection space. We created a web-based system implementing these methods, and report on findings from an evaluation with data analysts using the prototype to examine multidimensional datasets.

At the intersection of information visualization and typography lies the design space of micro visualization, a family of basic techniques enriching text in regard of its accessibility, comprehensibility, and memorability. We propose a taxonomy that differentiates specific types of visualizations applied to text design and layout. We elaborate two main approaches to aligning the visual appearance of a text and its content. The first explores the addition of graphical elements embedded into or adjacent to a text, while the other approach explores the visual modification of a text by means of typographic visualization. For this we evaluate how different techniques can be used as visual variables.

In recent years, access to cultural heritage has been closely connected to digitisation. We argue the case for recognising this digital shift as an opportunity to create interfaces to cultural heritage that are, first of all, more inviting to the public. Secondly, we want to encourage critical approaches towards the representation of cultural production and allow for alternative or even conflicting narratives and interpretations to surface. We present related work, use cases, and concepts for visualisations and interfaces that invite the reconsideration of modes of categorisation, presentation and clustering. Our intent is to develop ways to scrutinise modes of exclusion, carry out critical evaluations and pursue interventional strategies. We discuss the specific potential of visualisation, annotation and dynamic expansion of digital cultural collections. Building on critical approaches in human-computer interaction, visualisation and cultural theories, we explore how the interface could be a means of reflection, critique and inclusion.

Text visualisations provide visual representations of documents or small corpora with the primary aim of supporting language analysis. We are interested in developing a more playful approach to language that can be characterised by the notion of wandering as an open-ended movement. To support such a casual form of engagement with text, we designed the WordWanderer system: a visualisation technique that extends tag clouds into a navigational interface for text. The tool supports the gradual movement between word ‘context views’, which represent the words that co-occur in the vicinity of the selected word, and word-‘comparison views’, which arrange words based on their association strengths between two selected words. We report on the encouraging feedback from a ten-day deployment of the interface and present promising directions for future design and research.

Traffic incidents such as road accidents and vehicle breakdowns are a major source of travel uncertainty and delay, but the mechanism by which they cause heavy traffic is not fully understood. Traffic management controllers are tasked with routing repair and clean up crews to clear the incident and often have to do so under time pressure and with imperfect information. To aid their decision making and help them understand how past incidents affected traffic, we propose Traffic Origins, a simple method to visualize the impact road incidents have on congestion. Just before a traffic incident occurs, we mark the incident location with an expanding circle to uncover the underlying traffic flow map and when it ends, the circle recedes. This not only directs attention to upcoming events, but also allows us to observe the impact traffic incidents have on vehicle flow in the immediate vicinity and the cascading effect multiple incidents can have on a road network. We illustrate this technique using road incident and traffic flow data from Singapore.

Network log files often need to be investigated manually for suspicious activity. The huge amount of log lines complicates maintaining an overview, navigation and quick pattern identification. We propose a system that uses an interactive visualization, a visual filter, representing the whole log in an overview, allowing to navigate and make context-preserving subselections with the visualization and in this way reducing the time and effort for security experts needed to identify patterns in the log file. This explorative interactive visualization is combined with focused querying to search for known suspicious terms that are then highlighted in the visualization and the log file itself.

We created a pixel map for multi-variate data based on an analysis of the needs of network security engineers. Parameters of a log record are shown as pixels and these pixels get stacked to represent a record. This allows a broad view of a data set on one screen while staying very close to the raw data and to expose common and rare patterns of user behavior through the visualization itself (the “Carpet”). Visualizations that immediately point to areas of suspicious activity without requiring extensive fltering, help network engineers investigating unknown computer security incidents. Most of them, however, have limited knowledge of advanced visualization techniques, while many designers and data scientists are unfamiliar with computer security topics. To bridge this gap, we developed visualizations together with engineers, following a co-creative process. We will show how we explored the scope of the engineers’ tasks and how we jointly developed ideas and designs. Our expert evaluation indicates that this visualization helps to scan large parts of log fles quickly and to defne areas of interest for closer inspection.

Isochrone maps are an established method to depict areas of equal travel time, and have been used in transportation planning since the early 20th century. In recent years, interactive isochrone maps allowed users to select areas of interest, or explore temporal mobility patterns for different modes of transport. However, conventional isochrone maps depict one traffic situation at a time. Our visualization approach unifies isochrone maps with time-varying travel data, and instead of showing multiple isolines for different travel times, we show multiple isolines for different times of day in order to reveal time-dependent spatial travel variance. In this paper, we present Isoscope, a web application that provides an interactive map for casual exploration of urban mobility patterns. Through its aesthetic visual form and its simple interface we strive to support people casually investigating travel time in their own city. We will describe our design goals, elaborate on the design and implementation of our prototype, and discuss limitations and future extensions of the system.

Culturegraphy visualizes cultural information exchange over time. Treating cultural works as nodes and influences as directed edges, the visualization of these cultural networks can provide new insights into the rich interconnections of cultural development. The graphics represent complex relationships of movie references by combining macro views summarizing 100 years of movie influences with micro views providing a close-up look at the embedding of individual movies. The macro view shows the rise of the self-referential character of postmodern cinema, while the micro level illustrates differences between individual movies, when they were referenced and by whom. The visualizations provide views that are closer to the real complexity of the relationships than aggregated views or rankings could do.

Due to recent technical developments, urban systems generate large and complex data sets. While visualizations have been used to make these accessible, often they are tailored to one specific group of users, typically the public or expert users. We present Touching Transport, an application that allows a diverse group of users to visually explore public transit data on a multi-touch tabletop. It provides multiple perspectives of the data and consists of three visualization modes conveying tempo-spatial patterns as map, time-series, and arc view. We exhibited our system publicly, and evaluated it in a lab study with three distinct user groups: citizens with knowledge of the local environment, experts in the domain of public transport, and non-experts with neither local nor domain knowledge. Our observations and evaluation results show we achieved our goals of both attracting visitors to explore the data while enabling gathering insights for both citizens and experts. We discuss the design considerations in developing our system, and describe our lessons learned in designing engaging tabletop visualizations.

Monadic exploration is a new approach to interacting with relational information spaces that challenges the distinction between the whole and its parts. Building on the work of sociologists Gabriel Tarde and Bruno Latour we turn to the concept of the monad as a useful lens on online communities and collections that expands the possibility for creating meaning in their navigation. While existing interfaces tend to emphasize either the structure of the whole or details of a part, monadic exploration brings these opposing perspectives closer together in continuous movements between partially overlapping points of view. We present a visualization that reflects a given node’s relative position within a network using radial displacements and visual folding. To investigate the potential of monadic exploration we report on an iterative design process of a web-based visualization of a highly cross-referenced book and its six-month deployment.

A photo archive contains diverse narratives that only get partially exposed in digital interfaces. In this paper we explore a potential framework for archivists and designers to create photo archive interfaces that are sensitive to the ethos and social context of its content. We outline our approach to engaging with archival projects and present the results of a pilot workshop, which raised a range of complex questions about the design of visual interfaces. Our aim is to practically and conceptually expand how a visual interface would let a visitor access, explore, and interpret the contents of an archive. To do this we are interested in the different associations that people weave between the artefacts of an archive.

We present a visualization of subject headings that typically accompany books as flat textual metadata. The purpose of the visualization is twofold: first to expose the implicit structure in subject headings as an overview of a library collection and second to present a visual web of keywords to invite exploration of books. Taking a tag cloud as a starting point, the visualization extends it to a networked tag cloud that respects the hierarchy that is implicit in subject headings. By allowing an information seeker to successively build a subject filter, while seeing the results at each step, we hope to improve the searcher’s orientation in a comprehensive book collection.

Our work investigates concepts and methods for the design, creation, and application of prototypes for mobile software. It analyzes and compares existing prototyping approaches and develops a new prototyping paradigm called Blended Prototyping.

The general function of a prototype is to generate insights into an idea, which is not fully realized yet. These insights identify mistakes at an early state, and therefore help to avoid expensive misguided developments. A prototype’s value depends on its ability to communicate the exact questions, relevant at the given development stage. Existing prototyping approaches have problems to facilitate collaborative design discussions in bigger teams. Moreover, prototypes generated by these approaches can often just be implemented with such limited functionality, that they can solely be used in early development stages.

Blended Prototyping addresses these issues in using pen paper sketches as a central design element for the prototyping process. It promotes creative work in an interdisciplinary collaborative design and development process. To be applicable in the earliest design phases already, blended prototypes can be created as quickly and easily as possible; they allow however enough complexity to be relevant for the development for as many prototype iterations as needed.

This text describes the Blended Prototyping approach and its implementation in a first running version. It displays important design and interaction processes used in the platform and discusses the results generated by a first practice study with an external development team.

Rethinking Prototyping: Proceedings of the Design Modelling Symposium Berlin

Karten dienen seit Jahrtausenden als Repräsentationen räumlichen Wissens. Aufgrund ihrer herausragenden Fähigkeit zur Visualisierung von Geoinformationen gehörten sie allzeit zu den begehrtesten Artefakten der jeweils Herrschenden. Neben der Visualisierung von Geoinformationen dienten sie zur Kommunikation politischer und oftmals ideologischer Standpunkte im Zusammenhang mit dem Raumbezug (Crampton 2010; Meng 2009; Monmonier 1996).

Surveys are a common way of providing an overview over a family of visualization techniques. In this poster we focused on arc diagrams, which are an established method to visualize relations between nodes in a simple path graph, and are laid out in one dimension. We collected a wide range of examples of arc diagrams with different characteristics. Following Jurgensmann and Schulz’s poster on tree visualizations we present our collection as a visual survey. As a result, our poster acts as visual reference and as inspirational source.

Visualizing data with geo-spatial properties has become more important and prevalent due to the wide spread dissemination of devices, sensors, databases, and services with references to the physical world. Yet, with existing tools it is often difficult to create interactive geovisualizations tailored for a particular domain or a specific dataset. We present Unfolding, a library for interactive maps and data visualization. Unfolding provides an API for designers to quickly create and customize geo-visualizations. In this paper, we describe the design criteria, the development process, and the functionalities of Unfolding. We demonstrate its versatility in use through a collection of examples. Results from a user survey suggests programmers find the library easy to learn and to use.

In this paper we offer a critical discussion of data visualization by adapting theories of indexicality as discussed in semiotics and art history. An indexical statement is broadly one whose meaning is dependent on context. We examine how indexicality has informed practices in cinema, photography, and contemporary art and make comparisons with data visualization. Specifically, we explore how these analogies can result in generative concepts that can inform the design and study of data visualization.

As information visualization is increasingly used to raise awareness about social issues, difficult questions arise about the power of visualization. So far the research community has not given sufficient thought to how values and assumptions pervade information visualization. Taking engaging visualizations as a starting point, we outline a critical approach that promotes disclosure, plurality, contingency, and empowerment. Based on this approach, we pose some challenges and opportunities for visualization researchers and practitioners.

We present a new method for displaying visualization parameters to guide casual data exploration. When visualizing datasets with large parameter spaces it can be difficult to move between data views. Building on social navigation and degree-of-interest visualization, we propose the concept of accentuation as the selection and emphasis of visualization parameters based on social and semantic signals. We describe how we designed an accentuated visualization interface, and discuss open challenges and directions for future research.

Many thematic maps and geovisualizations nowadays are being created by designers, journalists, and other non cartographers. Yet, with existing tools it is often difficult to create interactive data visualizations tailored for a particular domain or a specific dataset. We present Unfolding, a library to simplify the creation of interactive maps and geovisualizations. Unfolding provides an API to quickly create and customize visualization applications. In this paper, we introduce the design and functionality of our library. We demonstrate its usability through a collection of examples, and confirm the apparent need of such map library by describing its acceptance in the community.