Background Articles

I've been reading at the following articles to prepare for my presentation and project proposal:

ButterflyNet related
Ron B. Yeh, Scott R. Klemmer, Jeannie Stamberger, and Andreas Paepcke. Mobility, Fluidity, And Physicality: A Study Of Field Biology Practices. Stanford University Computer Science Department Technical Report, CSTR, 2005.

Ron B. Yeh, Chunyuan Liao, Scott R. Klemmer, François Guimbretière, Brian Lee, Boyko Kakaradov, Jeannie Stamberger, and Andreas Paepcke. ButterflyNet: A Mobile Capture and Access System for Field Biology Research. CHI: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Montréal, Québec, Canada, 2006.

Timeline or Time-based visualizations
(Obviously SIMILE Timeline)

Ragnar Bade, Stefan Schlectweg, Silvia Miksh. Connecting Time-Oriented Data and Information to a Coherent Interactive Visualization CHI 2004. Vienna, Austria, Apr 24-29, 2004.

Jessica Lin, Eamonn Keogh, stefano Lonardi, Jeffrey Lankford, Donna Nystrom. Visually Mining and Monitoring Massive Time Series. Conference on Knowledge Discovery in Data 2004. Seattle, Washington, USA, Aug 22-25, 2004.

Michael Tsang, Nigel Morris, Ravin Balakrishnan. Temporal Thumbnails: Rapid Visualization of Time-Based Viewing Data. Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, 2004. Gallipoli, Italy, May 25-28 2004.

Daniel Keim, Jorn Schneidewind, Mike Sips. CircleView - A new approach for visualizing time-related multidimensional data sets. Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, 2004. Gallipoli, Italy, May 25-28 2004.

Other sources
Daniel Keim. Visual Exploration of Large Data Sets. Communications of the ACM, Aug 2001.

Stuart Card, Jock Mackinlay. Structure of the Information Visualization Design Space. Proc. Information Visualizations, 1997, IEEE.

SIMILE tutorial

I went through the SIMILE tutorial (http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/docs/create-timelines.html) yesterday to get a feel for how it works. It's a little confusing since you need to dig around to learn about the functionality they have built into their code, but to get a simple working timeline started, it's actually not too hard. My boyfriend, Leif, helped me out with this a bit, too, and he even wrote a python script that will take all the contents from the current working directory and create events from them to be displayed on the timeline (title, links, etc). It works pretty well!

As I was playing around with this I had some thoughts about what would be useful for our ethnographers. It might be useful to have each timeline "band" display information from a given modality (text, video, photos, audio, etc.), with an "overview" band at the bottom incorporating all the data in one place. It would also be useful to have individual events displayed to look like the media they are representing. PDF files would have a PDF logo (and maybe also a title). But JPEG files might be a thumbnail of the photo, with or without a title (depending on if one has been created for that JPEG yet). Currently, it does not appear that SIMILE is capable of doing this. Individual events are displayed either as bullet points or as durations, with simple text titles. Although, clicking on the events will bring up more information about them (such as links to the JPEG source, or external websites, etc.). If we are serious about pursuing this project, we could possibly work with the SIMILE team to implement this. (?)

Another thought I had was that this timeline should really be integrated with the ButterflyNet program. When you click on an event on the timeline, you should be able to annotate that event with a text box from the pop-up window, and that information should be saved with the event in ButterflyNet. I'm not sure how hard this would be to do yet.

I couldn't figure out how to attach my files here for you to download and look at. I'll bring in my laptop next week to show you, or maybe you could teach me how to attach a file in a posting?

Early Thoughts

I'd like to explore the use of visual timelines for displaying data from multiple digital sources. This is especially relevant for ethnographers today. After even a single day of observations, an ethnographer will have at least hand-written notes, digital still photos, and digital video/audio files. Currently our DCOG-HCI lab ethnographers are not using the ANOTO pen for fieldnotes, but I'll imagine a future when they do use a digital pen. Although the technology is not quite sophisticated enough for (our) ethnographers to make full use of it yet, the technology is arguably not far off. Consequently, while I'm researching this topic, I will be using the pen for my notes to try to get a feel for its benefits and drawbacks.

Let's imagine, though, that ethnographers use a digital pen for notes. Then digital time stamps could be used to sort, organize and coordinate the varius information sources they've collected over the course of the day. Ron Yeh and Scott Klemmer (at Stanford) have already implemented a program that makes use of digital time stamps to present field data side-by-side in a pretty nice interface: ButterflyNet

I'll explore ButteflyNet as I think about how this could lead into an effective timeline visualization. Where ButterflyNet links up complete data from different media sources, a timeline would provide a scalable overview of (glance at) what data is available. Maybe the timeline would provide ethnographers with a first-pass of the data, where they could quickly scroll through the full set of data to see what's available. Data points from the graph could be examined more closely by clicking on them, or even changing the scale. This might bring up the ButterflyNet program for a closer inspection of the data. (Just some early thoughts.)

The SIMILE project at MIT has developed a program for generating scalable, multi-tiered, interactive timelines. This could be a great program for displaying time-stamped digital data for our ethnographers. The lower tiers could be scaled by months, weeks or days; and the upper tiers could be scaled by hours. There could even be an upper tier for each digital media source: pen, photo, video, etc.

This coming week I'd like to begin using the ANOTO pen and begin trying out ButteflyNet. Ideally, I'd like to have a set of data similar to an ethnographer's real set for prototyping this timeline. I could either create a sample set of data, or I could use some data that Ed Hutchins and Saeko Nomura have collected. (It might be easier for the purposes of this research proposal to create a sample set.)


A few sources I will reference in researching this topic. Do you have other suggestions?

Ron B. Yeh, Chunyuan Liao, Scott R. Klemmer, François Guimbretière, Brian Lee, Boyko Kakaradov, Jeannie Stamberger, and Andreas Paepcke. ButterflyNet: A Mobile Capture and Access System for Field Biology Research. CHI: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Montréal, Québec, Canada, 2006.

Ron B. Yeh, Scott R. Klemmer, Jeannie Stamberger, and Andreas Paepcke. Mobility, Fluidity, And Physicality: A Study Of Field Biology Practices. Stanford University Computer Science Department Technical Report, CSTR, 2005.

Guimbretière, F. Paper augmented digital documents. UIST.
Vancouver, Canada: ACM Press. pp. 51-60, 2003.

SIMILE project - timeline

Info Viz project blog

I've just started this blog to record my progress on the project I'm doing for my Information Visualization class.

Course webpage:
http://hci.ucsd.edu/220/