Research Projects

These are a few of my favorite research projects, exploring different aspects of what it means to create a visualization with data.

A visualization created in the Hanpuku system.

How Designers design with Data

Tools like Illustrator are fantastic for quickly iterating on designs, but have limited ability to link to data. We studied how designers work with data, and created a tool to support them.

Bigelow, A., Drucker, S. M., Fisher, D., & Meyer, M. D. (2017). Iterating between Tools to Create and Edit Visualizations. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
Bigelow, A., Drucker, S. M., Fisher, D., & Meyer, M. D. Reflections on how designers design with data. In AVI 2014.

Animating Data

Animation is either the greatest thing to happen to data in history, or a terrible idea. Opinions are divided. I threw my hat into the ring and tried to figure out what I could learn.

D. Fisher. “Animation for Visualization: Opportunities and Drawbacks.” In J. Steele and N. Illisnki, eds. Beautiful Visualization. Sebastopol: OReilly Press, 2010.
Robertson, G. G., Fernandez, R., Fisher, D., Lee, B., & Stasko, J. T. (2008). Effectiveness of Animation in Trend Visualization. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 14(6), 1325–1332.

One step in a possible animation from a bar chart to a pie chart.

The Cambiera system in action: four hands on a tabletop

Collaborative Visualization

Two heads are better then one, surely. How does visualization become more useful when more than one person is looking at a dataset at the same time, on the same surface? Cambiera was an attempt to explore that question.

Isenberg, P., Fisher, D., Morris, M. R., Inkpen, K., & Czerwinski, M. (2010). An exploratory study of co-located collaborative visual analytics around a tabletop display. In IEEE VAST 2010.
Isenberg, P., & Fisher, D. (2011). Cambiera: collaborative tabletop visual analytics. In ACM CSCW 2011.
Isenberg, P., Fisher, D., Paul, S. A., Morris, M. R., Inkpen, K., & Czerwinski, M. (2012). Co-Located Collaborative Visual Analytics around a Tabletop Display. In IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

The Logan system shows the query "what actions did users carry out immediately before "Checkout"?

Sequences and Streams

Data analysts looking at clickstreams often want to ask about how a sequence of events happened. The (s|q)ueries and Logan systems tried to provide tools for phrasing these questions.

Fisher, D., Drucker, S., Czerwinski, M. DeLine, R., Rowan, K. Understanding the Breadth of the Event Space: Learning from Logan. IEEE Vis EventEvent.
Zgraggen, E., Drucker, S. M., Fisher, D., & DeLine, R. (2015). (s|qu)eries: Visual Regular Expressions for Querying and Exploring Event Sequences. In ACM CHI 2015.

Extending Excel

No visualization tool can express all the questions that users have. General-purpose tools, like Excel and PowerBI, must offer a form of extensibility. The WebCharts prototype explored a way of providing visualization-oriented Javascript for desktop applications.

This paved the way for Office Agaves and PowerBI's Custom Visuals.

Fisher, D., Drucker, S. M., Fernandez, R., & Ruble, S. (2010). Visualizations Everywhere: A Multiplatform Infrastructure for Linked Visualizations. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.