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

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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.