End-User Programming of Visualizations

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Visualizations have become important means of communicating information. As databecomes accessible for more people with no background in programming and dataanalytics, there is a growing need for more user-centered visualization software. Thisresearch proposal aims to investigate visualization creation from an end user developmentperspective, using the Attention Investment model of programming.Information visualization has become a common activity for many people. Visualizationsrange from simple graphs to infographics, are created by journalists publishing theirfindings or designers covering an entire topic in an expressive, compelling visualization,and can target news readers, business people or research audiences. Given the verydifferent groups of people that are using visualizations as means of communication, theways of creating these visualizations are diverse. Victor (2013) classifies these ways inthree paradigms: using, drawing and coding, each embodied in different softwareapplications. Representative examples would be Microsoft Excel, Adobe Illustrator andD3.js respectively.This research project proposes to look at data visualization from the perspective of enduser programming. From the end user perspective, learning a programming language forcreating visualizations, like Processing or Data-Driven Documents (D3.js) (Bostock et al.2011), is too expensive. As such, end users prefer to use a more direct manipulation ofinformation, for example spreadsheets (Lieberman et al 2006). However, research on thetopic of information visualization very rarely appears to be done in a user-centric manner,even if it's directed for end users (Pantazos et al. 2013).The approach proposed for end user programming of visualizations also draws on thetheory of Attention Investment (Blackwell 2002, Blackwell & Green 1999). The theory hasbeen successfully applied mostly to various spreadsheet functionalities (Beckwith et al.2002, Jones et al 2003), but not to data visualizations.Guided by the Attention Investment model, the aim is to study the cognitive aspects ofinformation visualization creation, how existing systems support the users and createprototypes for data visualization that accounts for the perceived costs, risks and benefits ofthe end users.