1. Cognitive Visualization Lab
Watson Group
Mauro Martino PhD
Cody Dunne PhD
Alan Keahey PhD
Jamie C. Rasmussen
Steven I. Ross
Kael Greco
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5. GraphTrail can make the same findings as other tools
COGNITIVE VISUALIZATION LAB
GraphTrail Lab Study
GraphTrail can make the same findings as other tools
And more!
New users can make findings
New users understand the exploration history
And usually motivation!

6. Field Study With Archaeologists
“How were Iron-Age communities integrated into the political and economic structure of the Roman Empire?”
“How were urban social hierarchies within the Roman provinces structured and articulated?”
Six archaeologists
Three months
Network of artifacts
~200 archaeological sites in S. Spain
24 node types, 35 edge types
~13,000 nodes, ~19,000 edges
Brughmans, T., et al., 2011

7. . . . COGNITIVE VISUALIZATION LAB
GraphTrail Field Study – Current Practice
. . .
Arduous, halting exploration in Cytoscape
Network slices
Difficulty with many node & edge types
Separate sliced visualizations
Large number of files
Collaborative analysis sessions
Difficult to pursue hypotheses
Analysis postponed to generate slices
One-mode network of the period BC, representing sites connected to sites which have evidence of the same pottery forms (co-presence). The line value indicates the number of pottery forms that are co-present.

8. COGNITIVE VISUALIZATION LAB
GraphTrail Field Study – Analyses
Every person on team could use, even those less familiar with database or analysis
5 hours first meeting
Used for three months
Quick & systematic exploration
New discoveries and error detection:
Two uncommon types of ceramics in Iberian sites -- data error. Group as one entity
Serendipitous discovery: “... noticed that some forms [of ceramics] were only found in distinct groups of sites, and that these sites had no other ceramic forms in their assemblages.”
Asked one archaeologist to explain an analysis
Extensive use of spatial organization
Exposition triggered questions & pushed further

9. Number of nodes, edges, types
COGNITIVE VISUALIZATION LAB
GraphTrail Scalability
Number of nodes, edges, types
Number of charts
20 – 30 per session
Nodes
Types
Edges
CHI
10K 3
20K 3+
Archaeology
13K 24 35
Benefits of exposing exploration history
Inspired exploration
Recall findings and exact process
Interpret explorations of others with visual history feedback
Annotations not needed for “how”, or even “why”
Scalability (Canvas)
Layout management cost for large explorations
Did not limit users in practice
Organization tightly coupled with exploration
Sessions of charts, with one file per task
Ways to manage
Collapsible branches
Semantic or continuously variable zoom
Prune to only show key results
Reuse charts and propagate changes
Scalability (Network)
Simplify nodes & edges by aggregating attributes
Explore node & edge types with pivoting