Supporting exploration awareness for visual analytics

Abstract

While exploring data using information visualization, analysts try to make sense of the data, build cases, and present them to others. However, if the exploration is long or done in multiple sessions, it can be hard for analysts to remember all interesting visualizations and the relationships among them they have seen. Often, they will see the same or similar visualizations, and are unable to recall when, why and how they have seen something similar. Recalling and retrieving interesting visualizations are important tasks for the analysis processes such as problem solving, reasoning, and conceptualization. In this paper, we argue that offering support for thinking based on past analysis processes is important, and present a solution for this.