Collaborative Research: HCC: Small: Bridging Research and Visualization Design Practice via a Sustainable Knowledge Platform

该项目旨在帮助将可视化实践与围绕可视化有效性的最先进的实证研究结合起来。这种一致性至关重要，因为政府、商业、工程和新闻等领域的广泛专业人士正在采用数据可视化来进行与社会问题相关的数据分析。然而，他们的数据分析和可视化工作往往没有充分的实证研究。设计师通常是自学成才的，而以实践者为中心的设计指南往往没有经验证据证明其有效性，并且来自不同的，有时是不一致的来源。通常，这些来源不是研究人员；尽管在开发研究支持的指导方针和可视化工具方面已经做出了一些努力，但总的来说，研究界还没有做出一致的努力，使其结果可供实践者使用。这反过来又会导致效果较差的可视化，从而损害决策和公众理解。该项目旨在通过建立一个全面的平台，改善对有效可视化设计的获取和学习，促进知情的、循证的设计实践，从而弥合这一知识鸿沟。该项目围绕三个研究重点组织。第一部分将通过研究设计实践和实证研究的现状来探索知识差距。该项目将调查现有指南的情况，收集更多或更少准确和可访问的可视化示例的数据集，并分析这些指南和可视化与经验研究中已知的内容的重叠和差异。这种对工件的分析将通过对实践者和研究人员的访谈来补充，这些实践者和研究人员关注于他们在知识转移方面的实践和挑战。第二个重点将巩固数据收集和分析，为脚手架可视化设计知识开发一个本体论框架，以及一个基于知识的平台，人们可以在其中浏览、讨论和维护指南、经验证据和相关可视化示例的不断发展的列表。最后的推动力将超越知识管理，扩大到生产和传播。该项目将采用公民科学的方法来调查现实世界中未开发的设计空间，其中涉及典型实证研究中缺乏的设计元素。该平台还将提供一个编程接口，以支持智能设计助手和教育评估工具等新颖的外部应用。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project aims to help align visualization practice with state-of-the-art empirical research around visualization effectiveness. This alignment is critical because a wide range of professionals in sectors including government, business, engineering, and journalism are adopting data visualizations for data analysis connected to social issues. However, their data analysis and visualization work is often not well-informed by empirical research. Designers are often self-taught, while practitioner-focused design guidelines are often not substantiated by empirical evidence of their effectiveness and come from different and sometimes inconsistent sources. Often, those sources are not researchers; although there have been some efforts to develop research-backed guidelines and visualization tools, on balance, the research community has not made a concerted effort to make its results usable for practitioners. This, in turn, leads to less effective visualizations that can harm both decision-making and public understanding. This project aims to bridge this knowledge gap by building a comprehensive platform for improving access to and learning about effective visualization design and promoting informed, evidence-based design practice.The project is organized around three research thrusts. The first thrust will explore the knowledge gap by examining the current state of design practice and empirical research. The project will survey the landscape of existing guidelines, collect a dataset of more and less accurate and accessible visualization examples, and analyze overlaps and discrepancies of these guidelines and visualizations with what is known from empirical research studies. This analysis of artifacts will be complemented by interviews with practitioners and researchers that focus on the practices and challenges they have around knowledge transfer. The second thrust will consolidate the data collection and analysis to develop an ontological framework for scaffolding visualization design knowledge, along with a knowledge-based platform where people can browse, discuss, and maintain an evolving list of guidelines, empirical evidence, and relevant visualization examples. The final thrust will go beyond knowledge management to production and dissemination. The project will employ a citizen science approach to investigate the unexplored design space in real-world visualizations that involve design elements absent in typical empirical studies. The platform will also provide a programming interface to enable novel external applications such as intelligent design assistants and educational assessment tools.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.