Reflections on the design of a system for visualizing a high-dimensional environmental sustainability dataset. Despite some successes on designing visual encoding and interaction techniques, QuestVis was ultimately not deployed because of a mismatch between the design goals of the project and the true needs of the target user community. We analyze this breakdown in the context of the Nested Model framework, which was motivated in part by this experience.

This monograph provides design guidelines for designing multi-level interfaces based on a fine-grained analysis of of 22 empirical studies. We considered three multi-level interface types in this synthesis review: temporal, or temporal switching of the different levels as in zooming interfaces; separate, or displaying the different levels simultaneously but in separate windows as in overview + detail interfaces; and embedded, or showing the different levels in a unified view as in focus + context interfaces.

A book chapter for an undergraduate computer graphics textbook summarizing process, principles, and techniques for visualization with an emphasis on abstract data.

A book chapter exhorting infovis authors to avoid pitfalls at several stages of research process, including visual encoding during design, a checkpoint before starting to write, and after a full paper draft exists. The paper page includes my current list of favorite design study examples.

This report, sponsored by the NIH and NSF, is a followup to the 1987 NSF Visualization report. Our goal is to evaluate the progress of the maturing field of visualization, to help focus and direct future research projects, and to provide guidance on how to apportion national resources. Our findings and recommendations reflect not only information gathered from visualization and applications scientists during two workshops on Visualization Research Challenges but also input from the larger visualization community.

Invited paper discussing Cerebral and Pathline design rationale in detail in the context of the Nested Model framework.

Design study about a visualization tool that supports exploration of multiple possible computational summaries that mix spatial information about each cell in a developing fruit fly embryo, gene expression measurements over time, and data from multiple related species or organisms.

Dimensionality reduction for the rest of us: system paper about toolkit for dimensionality reduction providing local and global guidance to users who may not be experts in the mathematics of high-dimensional data analysis.

Journal version of PacificVis TugGraph paper.

Design study of a visualization tool for comparative functional genomics supporting simultaneous analysis of functional, pathway, and phylogenetic data. We present two new visual encoding techniques: linearized metabolic pathways, and curvemaps.

This model provides a unified framework for considering both the design and the validation of visualization systems at four cascading levels, with prescriptive advice on determining appropriate evaluation approaches by identifying threats to validity unique to each level.

Design study on the creation of a multiscale synteny browser for exploring conservation relationship in comparative genomics data.

TugGraph is a system for exploring paths and proximity around nodes and subgraphs in a multilevel graph.

Glimmer is a new multilevel multidimensional scaling algorithm that exploits the GPU. We demonstrate its benefits in a detailed comparison against several previous algorithms.

Paper for the biological community describing InnateDB, including the Cerebral visualization component.

We describe the data information display needs of immunologists and describe the design decisions used to create Cerebral, a system that incorporates experimental data directly into the graph display, using the biologically guided graph layout announced in the previous appnote.

GrouseFlocks supports interactive exploration of the space of possible hierarchies for an input graph with domain-specific attributes at the nodes. The system generates hierarchies that reflect the underlying graph topology by requiring that subgraphs respect edge and connectivity conservation.

Based on our experience in extracting design guidelines from existing quantitative studies, we recommend improvements to both study design and reporting to promote meta-analysis.

The LiveRAC visualization system supports the analysis of large collections of time-series data with hundreds of parameters across thousands of network devices. It provides high information density using a reorderable matrix of charts, with semantic zooming adapting each chart's visual representation to the available space.

For the task we studied, point-based spatializations were far superior to landscapes, and 2D landscapes were superior to 3D landscapes.

We compared four interfaces: overview-only, detail-only, separate overview and detail windows, and detail embedded within overview as in Focus+Context interfaces.

Taking a multiple-coordinated view approach, Session Viewer shows multiple session populations at the Aggregate, Multiple, and Detail data levels to support different analysis styles.

Interactive and steerable exploration of multilevel graph hierarchies, as created by TopoLayout.

Short note aimed at the bioinformatics community announcing a graph layout approach for protein-protein interaction networks that exploits annotations about where genes/proteins are expressed within a cell and their function.

Multilevel graph drawing algorithm where the original graph is decomposed into features based on topological structures such as trees and clusters, each feature is drawn with an appropriately tuned algorithm, and passes for crossing reduction and overlap elimination reduce visual clutter.

Two-level approach to drawing complex graphs where an area-aware version of the RINGS tree drawing algorithm is used to show the high-level structure, and the force-directed LGL approach is used to show the low-level structure.

Navigation for accordion drawing, whereas previous papers focused on rendering.

Evaluation of how both linear and nonlinear geometric transformations affect visual memory, as opposed to previous paper on visual search.

Evaluation comparing navigation techniques and availability of contextual information.

Five-page summary of VRC report.

Five-page summary of VRC report.

Longer journal version of PRISAD paper, recommended over the conference version. The algorithm explanation is clearer and more detailed.

Conference version of PRISAD paper, presenting generic and efficient infrastructure for accordion drawing with an emphasis on rendering.

We quantify the perceptual cost of geometric transformations for visual search tasks, finding no-cost and low-cost zones for fisheye transformations.

Visual diff for trees, introducing accordion drawing.

In this short introduction I briefly describe the goals of the field of information visualization to set the stage for the four accepted papers in this special issue, for which I was the guest editor.

This paper discusses a user study conducted at Microsoft Research that found a statistically significant improvement in task time when a novel web browser that included the H3Viewer was compared to more traditional browsers.

My dissertation includes a chapter each on the H3, Planet Multicast, and Constellation projects, with much more analysis than appeared in any of the original papers.

A paper on interactive rendering of scenes where objects can have different projections, as in the simulaneous multiple viewpoints of Cubist paintings.

A paper on a 2D interactive system which uses a custom graph layout algorithm and many perceptual channels to help computational linguists debug their algorithms for generating and using large semantic networks.

A paper which presents the H3Viewer guaranteed frame rate drawing algorithm, along with a brief review of the H3 layout algorithm for context. Very large graphs can be navigated at a constant frame rate, as long as the entire graph can fit into main memory. The viewer is custom OpenGL/C++ code. My implementation of the algorithm discussed here was shipped with the Site Manager 1.1 software from SGI. The source is available for free noncommercial use.

An article which briefly reviews the H3 layout and H3Viewer drawing algorithms. The main new material here is a discussion about possible tasks for graph drawing beyond the global overview problem.

A paper that presents a much improved layout algorithm that exploits some of the properties of 3D hyperbolic space to achieve reasonable information density. The viewer is a highly modified version of Geomview, which supports manual subtree collapse and expansion. My implementation of the algorithm discussed here was shipped with the Site Manager 1.0 software from SGI.

A case study describing the Planet Multicast project: an interactive 3D geographic visualization of the Internet's multicast backbone, where tunnels are shown as arcs on a globe.

The first of my hyperbolic papers. The layout algorithm is the the most straightforward extension of cone trees to 3D hyperbolic space. The viewer is Geomview/WebOOGL. The system allows neither manual nor automatic collapsing of the graph, so scalability is extremely limited.

A survey article about interactive mathematical visualization, includes many pictures.