IEEE VIS 2024 Content: DataGarden: Formalizing Personal Sketches into Structured Visualization Templates

DataGarden: Formalizing Personal Sketches into Structured Visualization Templates

Anna Offenwanger - Université Paris-Saclay, Orsay, France

Theophanis Tsandilas - Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, Inria, LISN, Orsay, France

Fanny Chevalier - University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

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Room: Bayshore II

2024-10-17T15:15:00ZGMT-0600Change your timezone on the schedule page
2024-10-17T15:15:00Z
Exemplar figure, described by caption below
DataGarden supports sketching personal, expressive designs and formalizing these as structured visualization templates. To express (A) a visualization design idea, a user sketches a few representative glyphs in (B) the canvas, making their vision explicit. DataGarden provides the means to structure the freeform sketch into a visualization template by (C) capturing implicit style and explicit data mappings via user interaction and machine support.
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Keywords

Personal Visualization, Visualization template, Sketch input, Sketch-based visualization, Visualization by-example

Abstract

Sketching is a common practice among visualization designers, and an approachable entry to visualizations for individuals, but moving from a sketch to a full fledged data visualization often requires throwing away the original sketch recreating it from scratch. We aim to instead formalize thesesketches, enabling them to support iteration and systematic data mapping through a visual-first templating workflow. In this workflow, authors sketch a representative visualization and structure it into an expressive template for an envisioned or partial dataset, capturing implicit style as well as explicit data mappings. In order to demonstrate and evaluate our proposed workflow, we implement DataGarden, and evaluate it through a reproduction and a freeform study. We discuss how DataGarden supports personal expression, and delve into the variety of visualizations that authors can produce with it, identifying cases which demonstrate the limitations of our approach and discuss avenues for future work.