InfoVis 2004 Contest Entry

Exploring InfoVis Publication History with Tulip

Contest webpage: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~tmm/papers/contest04

Authors and Affiliations:

Tool(s):

We use David Auber's open-source Tulip software system for scalable exploration of graphs and trees. For more on the base capabilities of Tulip, and the Strahler-convolution clustering and small-world clustering, see these papers:
Tulip - A Huge Graph Visualization Framework
David Auber
Graph Drawing Software, Springer-Verlag, Mathematics and Visualization series, Petra Mutzel and Michael Jünger, pages 105-126, 2003
ISBN: 3-540-00881-0

Strahler based graph clustering using convolution
David Auber, Maylis Delest, and Yves Chiricota
8th International IEEE Conference, Information Visualisation, London, 2004

Multiscale Visualization of Small World Networks
David Auber, Yves Chiricota, Fabien Jourdan, and Guy Melançon
InfoVis'03, 2003, pages 75-81

Using Strahler numbers for real time visual exploration of huge graphs
David Auber
International Conference on Computer Vision and Graphics 2002, pages 56-69
In all images below, unless otherwise indicated the graph layout used is Frick's GEM algorithm as implemented in Tulip, with some manual movement of clusters within an image maximize readability. We use a greedy algorithm to decide which labels to draw, that uses available space in order of the Strahler metric of the nodes. The visual density of the labels was manually optimized for each image using an interactive slider. The titles of all conferences and some papers were manually shortened to make browsing easier.


TASK 1: Static Overview of 10 years of Infovis


  1. InfoVis Evolution Over Time

  2. InfoVis Papers and Authors

  3. InfoVis Papers and Conferences

TASK 2: Characterize the research areas and their evolution


  1. Comparing Metrics

  2. Evolution over Time: All Papers

  3. Evolution over Time: InfoVis papers only

  4. Top Topics and Authors

TASK 3: The people in InfoVis


Task 3.1: Where does a particular author/researcher fit within the research areas defined in task 2?

  1. Previous Answers See Tasks Task 2.1 and Task 2.2 for a combined answer.

  2. Focusing on a Single Author: Raw Dataset

  3. Focusing on a Single Author: Augmented Dataset

Task 3.2: What, if any, are the relationships between two or more or all researchers?

  1. Focusing on Two Authors

  2. Central Authors and Conferences: Overview

  3. Central Authors and Conferences: Top Authors

  4. Hierarchical Structure of Interauthor Connections

OTHER TASKS


  1. Pre-InfoVis Conference Evolution:

  2. What happened in 1997?


COMMENTS


Many of our answers span tasks 2 and 3: showing some combination of topics, the relationship between authors and topics, and the relationship between authors and authors, and the evolution of all these aspects over time.

We use rainbow colormaps as a quick shortcut for true segmented colormap: we are usually interested in the high ranking part of the dataset where the reds and pinks and blues are clearly distinguishable, and less interested in the more uniform yellow-green region at the low end of the ramp.