ABSTRACT
In the face of complex decisions, people often engage in a three-stage process that spans from (1) exploring and analyzing pertinent information (intelligence); (2) generating and exploring alternative options (design); and ultimately culminating in (3) selecting the optimal decision by evaluating discerning criteria (choice). We can fairly assume that all good visualizations aid in the "intelligence" stage by enabling data exploration and analysis. Yet, to what degree and how do visualization systems currently support the other decision making stages, namely "design" and "choice"? To further explore this question, we conducted a comprehensive review of decision-focused visualization tools by examining publications in major visualization journals and conferences, including VIS, EuroVis, and CHI, spanning all available years. We employed a deductive coding method and in-depth analysis to assess whether and how visualization tools support design and choice. Specifically, we examined each visualization tool by (i) its degree of visibility for displaying decision alternatives, criteria, and preferences, and (ii) its degree of flexibility for offering means to manipulate the decision alternatives, criteria, and preferences with interactions such as adding, modifying, changing mapping, and filtering. Our review highlights the opportunities and challenges that decision-focused visualization tools face in realizing their full potential to support all stages of the decision making process. It reveals a surprising scarcity of tools that support all stages, and while most tools excel in offering visibility for decision criteria and alternatives, the degree of flexibility to manipulate these elements is often limited, and the lack of tools that accommodate decision preferences and their elicitation is notable. Based on our findings, to better support the choice stage, future research could explore enhancing flexibility levels and variety, exploring novel visualization paradigms, increasing algorithmic support, and ensuring that this automation is user-controlled via the enhanced flexibility I evels. Our curated list of the 88 surveyed visualization tools is available in the OSF link (https://osf.io/nrasz/?view_only=b92a90a34ae241449b5f2cd33383bfcb).
Subject(s)
Computer Graphics , Decision Making , HumansABSTRACT
We present the results of a scientometric analysis of 30 years of IEEE VIS publications between 1990-2020, in which we conducted a multifaceted analysis of interdisciplinary collaboration and gender composition among authors. To this end, we curated BiblioVIS, a bibliometric dataset that contains rich metadata about IEEE VIS publications, including 3032 articles and 6113 authors. One of the main factors differentiating BiblioVIS from similar datasets is the authors' gender and discipline data, which we inferred through iterative rounds of computational and manual processes. Our analysis shows that, by and large, inter-institutional and interdisciplinary collaboration has been steadily growing over the past 30 years. However, interdisciplinary research was mainly between a few fields, including Computer Science, Engineering and Technology, and Medicine and Health disciplines. Our analysis of gender shows steady growth in women's authorship. Despite this growth, the gender distribution is still highly skewed, with men dominating ( ≈ 75%) of this space. Our predictive analysis of gender balance shows that if the current trends continue, gender parity in the visualization field will not be reached before the third quarter of the century ( ≈ 2070). Our primary goal in this work is to call the visualization community's attention to the critical topics of collaboration, diversity, and gender. Our research offers critical insights through the lens of diversity and gender to help accelerate progress towards a more diverse and representative research community.