LifeLines:Visualizing Personal Histories Plaisant, Milash, Rose, Widoff, Shneiderman Presented by Girish Kumar and Rajiv Gandhi

Outline Overview + Detail LifeLines Example -- Dept. of Juvenile Justice Related Work Conclusion and Critique

Favorite Sentence “An intuitive approach to visualizing histories is to use graphical time scales.”

Overview + Detail Provides multiple views –overview for orientation –detailed view for further work e.g.- virtual space on the desktop

LifeLines Maps histories on graphical time scale Overview screen displays multiple facets of data Stories or aspects are lines Periods correspond to changes of size or color along the line Discrete events are marked by icons Set of buttons gives access to general information

An Example - Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ)

Key Features Interrelationships between periods or events on the lines can be highlighted Line thickness indicates the severity of offence Color indicates the depth of penetration in the system

Benefits of LifeLines Users are less likely to miss information Facilitates the spotting of anomalies and trends Streamlines access to details Tailorable to various applications

Issues Representing large amount of information at overview level Efficient space utilization Integration with data entry techniques

Browsing Hierarchical Data With Multi- Level Dynamic Queries And Pruning Kumar, Plaisant, Shneiderman

Key Ideas Browse large hierarchies and view it at different levels Dynamic Queries used to filter nodes at each level of the tree Pruning of sub-trees of uninteresting nodes to get more compact views

PDQ Tree Browser Tree structure is visualized in two tightly- coupled views - Overview and Detailed User selectable dynamic query panel Tree structure changes only when the current lowest level of the tree is changed Pruning is done to eliminate non-matching subtrees

An Example - The University Finder

Key Features Helps locate interesting parts of large trees Tightly coupled overview and detailed views Easy to use interface

Limitations Interface fine tuned for tree of depth 5 Manual selection and pruning not supported Doesn’t support all boolean queries Does not utilize available space efficiently Change in layout not animated Doesn’t support searching upwards in the tree

Conclusions and Critique Time is an effective variable to display personal histories Overview + Detail –maintain overall context –navigate data details Overview may become cluttered with large amounts of data Need for better space utilization techniques