Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Visualization

Heer, Viegas, Wattenberg

social networking data analysis visualization asynchronous collaboration

@article{heer:cacm-2009,
  title={Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Visualization},
  author={Jeffrey Heer and Fernanda B. Vi\'{e}gas and Martin Wattenberg},
  journal={Communications of the {ACM}},
  volume={52},
  number={1},
  month={January},
  year={2009}
}

Computer supported collaborative work

Time space matrix

• Participating at same time?
• Participating at same place?

Asynchronous collaboration improves decision making process

• Higher quality output, with "broader discussions, more complete reports, and longer solutions"

Discussion types

• Independent: Conversations link to artifacts, but not otherwise
• Embedded: Artifacts link to conversations
• Bidirectional

Participants must be able to establish common ground for the discussion, i.e., a shared view of the data

• Requires storing and sharing view state
• May facilitate opportunistic collaboration by detecting common views
  • Not necessarily trivial: May arrive at same view via multiple paths/settings
• Doing this is general or taking to the next level may require some semantic understanding of the data

Need to not impede users' ability to operate indepedently

Managing large scale discussions, usage is a tough challenge

• Groups and limited sharing?

Implementation notes

• Integrates URLs and location bar to promote link sharing, back and forward buttons to maximize user familiarity

Annotations are often unnecessary for disambiguating, etc, but users like them

• Possibly help user craft their own train of thought more than they help with pointing out points of interest, etc

Provide visual cues in the presentation, guiding people to active areas of discussion, etc?

• An "information scent" which they can follow to find interesting areas, or avoid to find unexplored areas

Need to be able to reference multiple views in sequence to construct a story, follow a theory, etc

On the wild Internet, much collaboration may happen off-site (blogs, etc), an important design consideration

Of note:

• Mixed-methods analysis combining quantitative and qualitative
• 5-point Likert scale
• Cohen's kappa statistic