Corpus of Graphical-Textual Presentations

Giuseppe Carenini - 97

What this corpus is not

Sources

The Corpus is organized in categories that are not mutually exclusive or complete (i.e some presentations belong to more than one category and you may easily discover new presentations that do not fit in any category). As soon as the work on presentational goals will reach a stable state, the corpus will be reorganized, probably the "argumentation categories" will be restructured to include most of the presentations.

If you find anything wrong, confusing, interesting etc. please send your comments to carenini@cs.ubc.ca . A sample presentation is uniquely identified by the last number in its identifier. We are also interested in any new presentation you might find that can be added to the corpus.

For AB group (Pitt-CMU):  * indicates that the design might not be possible in x-SAGE (please send me comments about this judgement).

Argumentation

• Nothing has changed it... so nothing will ( ex1 -5)
• Highest than ever, yet low.... ( ex1-6)
• More of X does not affect Y...( ex1-7?*? )
• Argumentative annotation ( ex1-8)
• Causal explanation for change (or no-change)( ex2-2, ex3 -3, ex4-4*, ex1-1 ). One of the communicative function of a chart is to show how an eventualty (event, process, state) affected a variable. A simple case is the before-after chart in time-series. We can envision more complex cases for all the possible combinations of temporal relations between eventualities and variables ( During X, Y increased - Every time X, Y decreases - For the first time ... - ...).
• Violated expectations. Something changed without plausible reason.( ex1-33* )
• Unplausible correlation: whenever plotting some data indicates an "impossible" correlation, the chart can be used as evidence of "something wrong" in the source of the data (ex1-34). This picture is not local sometimes it takes a while to unload.
• X is better than Y...( ex1-9* , ex2-10* )... X is an useful index (ex1-11*)
• Complex argument...( ex1-12 , ex2-13 *)

Interesting graphic designs

• Bar chart with absolute value and label with percentage (ex1-14 ) or opposite ( ex5-30). Very common in the Economist.
• Subset is compared with superset respect to some attributes ( ex1-15). You can obtain such a presentation in Envisage by selecting the subset. Obviously, these graphs, by pointing out a specific subset of a set, can play very different argumentative functions. I discuss such differences in my document on communicative goals.
• Aggregation (again, the selection of particular aggregations disaggregations can have different argumentative functions...)
• Mix of aggregates and non-aggregates (or aggregates at different levels) in the same chart ( ex1-16, ex2-17, ex3-18, ex4-19 , ex5-20*)
• Mix of aggregates and non-aggregates in different charts in the same presentation ( ex1-2 )
• Different ranges in different charts for the same presentation ( ex1 -2)
• Aggregates are expicitly removed from data (ex-10*)
• Show conclusion and raw data(ex1-22*)
• Meaningful paths and areas in relational spaces (i.e. no maps) . I believe this class of graphs should be carefully studied (ex1-23*,ex2-24*,ex3-25*).

Interesting combination of graphic and text

• Text discusses subsets (including one element only) with particular interesting features ( ex1-26, ex2-27, ex3-28 , ex5-30, ) . More detailed analysis in my document on communicative goals.
• Aggregation/Disaggregation ( ex1-31, ex2-32 , ex3-19)

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Maps (very preliminary)

• Map-graph ( ex1-41 )
• Maps with tables ( ex1-42 )

Graphical annotations (more to be included, Vibhu is also working on this now)

• One graph is the expansion of a part of another graph ( ex1-43* ). Source: Kosslyn
• On the axes ( ex1-33* - F'cast on X-axis). I suggested to use the same technique to identify shortfalls in the IUI paper.
• Extremely large values (ex1-14)
• Areas between two lines ( ex1-8 )
• Aggregation ( ex1-32 )

Miscellaneous

• Present only a subset to make a point. This is probably true for many charts, but it is difficult to identify because usually the whole data set is not mentioned ( ex1-34 )
• "A graph that provides more info than the readers need forces them to filter and search. Directly label only the critical values."( ex1-35). Source: Kosslyn

to do: all the ones form Economics (E)