Sara Alspaugh and Anna Swigart and Ian MacFarland and Randy H. Katz and Marti Hearst

EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley

Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2015-208

November 2, 2015

http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2015/EECS-2015-208.pdf

Full-featured data analysis tools provide users a wide variety of ways to transform and visualize their data; ironically, this abundance can be as much hindrance as help in the initial stage of data exploration. In these stages, the critical question is often not "what steps must I take to visualize this data?" but rather "what is this data and what can it tell me?" This mismatch leads to several intertwined challenges. It’s difficult to get a mental picture of the data without first visualizing it, but it’s hard to identify the appropriate way to visualize the data without first having a mental picture of it. Moreover, it’s all too easy for an intriguing data point to pique a researcher’s interest and distract them from their current task. This difficult-to-navigate and distraction-rich environment can easily hide faulty assumptions from notice until they botch the analysis later down the line. Together these problems can send the analyst tumbling down a rabbit-hole of progressively deeper and sometimes misguided analysis, while the remainder of the data landscape lies uncharted. We investigate whether we can address these problems through a set of interface features that could easily be incorporated into current visual analytics tools. We built a prototype implementation of these features called DataFramer. Preliminary assessment via a study with 29 participants suggests the approach of examining data and stating questions before exploring the data is promising. We present a taxonomy of exploratory analysis statements and errors, as well as qualitative observations about how participants posed questions for exploring data using different tools.

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BibTeX citation:

@techreport{Alspaugh:EECS-2015-208,
    Author= {Alspaugh, Sara and Swigart, Anna and MacFarland, Ian and Katz, Randy H. and Hearst, Marti},
    Title= {Rethinking the First Look at Data by Framing It},
    Year= {2015},
    Month= {Nov},
    Url= {http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2015/EECS-2015-208.html},
    Number= {UCB/EECS-2015-208},
    Abstract= {Full-featured data analysis tools provide users a wide variety of ways to transform and visualize their data; ironically, this abundance can be as much hindrance as help in the initial stage of data exploration. In these stages, the critical question is often not "what steps must I take to visualize this data?" but rather "what is this data and what can it tell me?" This mismatch leads to several intertwined challenges. It’s difficult to get a mental picture of the data without first visualizing it, but it’s hard to identify the appropriate way to visualize the data without first having a mental picture of it. Moreover, it’s all too easy for an intriguing data point to pique a researcher’s interest and distract them from their current task. This difficult-to-navigate and distraction-rich environment can easily hide faulty assumptions from notice until they botch the analysis later down the line. Together these problems can send the analyst tumbling down a rabbit-hole of progressively deeper and sometimes misguided analysis, while the remainder of the data landscape lies uncharted. We investigate whether we can address these problems through a set of interface features that could easily be incorporated into current visual analytics tools. We built a prototype implementation of these features called DataFramer. Preliminary assessment via a study with 29 participants suggests the approach of examining data and stating questions before exploring the data is promising. We present a taxonomy of exploratory analysis statements and errors, as well as qualitative observations about how participants posed questions for exploring data using different tools.},
}

EndNote citation:

%0 Report
%A Alspaugh, Sara 
%A Swigart, Anna 
%A MacFarland, Ian 
%A Katz, Randy H. 
%A Hearst, Marti 
%T Rethinking the First Look at Data by Framing It
%I EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley
%D 2015
%8 November 2
%@ UCB/EECS-2015-208
%U http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2015/EECS-2015-208.html
%F Alspaugh:EECS-2015-208