ComputableViz: Mathematical Operators as a Formalism for Visualisation Processing and Analysis
Published at
CHI
| New Orleans, LA
2022
Abstract
Data visualizations are created and shared on the web at an unprecedented speed,
raising new needs and questions for processing and analyzing visualizations
after they have been generated and digitized. However, existing formalisms focus
on operating on a single visualization instead of multiple visualizations,
making it challenging to perform analysis tasks such as sorting and clustering
visualizations. Through a systematic analysis of previous work, we abstract
visualization-related tasks into mathematical operators such as union and
propose a design space of visualization operations. We realize the design by
developing ComputableViz, a library that supports operations on multiple
visualization specifications. To demonstrate its usefulness and extensibility,
we present multiple usage scenarios concerning processing and analyzing
visualization, such as generating visualization embeddings and automatically
making visualizations accessible. We conclude by discussing research
opportunities and challenges for managing and exploiting the massive
visualizations on the web.