Supporting Exploration in Social Data

Analysis

Adam Perer Abstract

Human-Computer Interaction Lab Recent implementations of social data analysis services
Department of Computer Science have focused on providing visual overviews of data and
University of Maryland forums for public debate and commentary. While these
College Park, MD 20742 are necessary features for supporting data analysis for
adamp@cs.umd.edu social collaboration, we argue that more attention
should be spent on improving the exploration
Ben Shneiderman experience of users. Improved exploration will allow
Human-Computer Interaction Lab users to dig deeper into the data. Furthermore, richer
Department of Computer Science analysis tools will benefit from the collaborative efforts
University of Maryland of many users. There is a need for sophisticated
College Park, MD 20742 filtering, which allows users to find patterns, gaps and
ben@cs.umd.edu outliers in the midst of an overwhelming visualization.
There is also a need for an integration of statistics with
the visualizations, which facilitate discovery by
providing important clues to complex data. We believe
that supporting advanced filtering techniques and an
integration of statistics and visualization will increase
the utility of social data analysis services.

Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).
CHI 2008, April 5 – April 10, 2008, Florence, Italy
ACM 1-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
Keywords
Exploratory data analysis, social data analysis,
information visualization, statistics, filtering
ACM Classification Keywords
H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g.,
HCI): Miscellaneous.

Introduction
Websites such as Data360 [1], ManyEyes [9] and
Swivel [8] have introduced the masses to the social
capabilities of data analysis tools. On these websites,
users can upload data, create visualizations, and enable
a community of interested viewers to take part in the
analysis. By sharing comments, creating different
projections, annotating interesting outliers or patterns,
or offering speculation on why the data is the way it is,
the audience can go beyond the data provider’s
insights. They can point out missed insights, provide
different interpretations, or suggest mistakes in the
underlying data set. These features are extremely
important in delivering accountability to data analysis,
as well as leveraging the intellect of many interested
analysts. Furthermore, these social data analysis
websites act as forums to communicate data in
interactive ways previously only available to developers
or purchasers of expensive software suites.
Although the features offered by these services are
both groundbreaking and exemplary, we argue that
improving the exploratory capabilities should receive
further attention. In this position paper, we focus on
two specific goals: 1) allowing users to dig deeper
using sophisticated filtering tools, and 2) integrating
statistics with visualizations to guide users to data with
interesting properties. We believe these additional
features will allow richer exploration on social data
analysis services, and consequently, richer social
activity.
Beyond Overviews: Digging Deeper with
Filtering
2
In current social data analysis systems, the
visualizations often feature limited interactive
capabilities for exploration. They present rich
overviews of the data, ranging from traditional
scatterplots and histograms to more modern treemaps
and network visualizations. However, we argue that
these sites offer limited functionality for filtering and
zooming, step 2 of the Visual Information Seeking
Mantra [6].
There are several side effects for not properly
supporting filtering. First, scalability is limited as all
data is forced to always be present in the visualization.
Second, users may compensate for this first constraint
by filtering off-site. This behavior has a danger of
users throwing out important data accidently simply
because they did not have access to a visual filtering
process.
It is important to note that enabling filtering increases
the number of paths of exploration and thus also the
complexity of the system. These types of interactions
can further confuse novices who wish to contribute to
analysis. One possible solution is to allow the creators
of the visualization to produce guidance in the spirit of
SpotFire guides [7], which can direct novice users
through important analytical steps. A more
sophisticated solution would support Systematic Yet
Flexible (SYF) guides, which records users’ progress
towards authored goals while also supporting flexible
exploration [4].
Visual filtering works best when supported by dynamic
queries and range sliders to give users direct control.
Since users should be able to filter in as many
dimensions that exist in the data set, the interface

Figure 1. The rank-by-feature framework
helps users find important patterns between
many columns in data.
Figure 2. A complex network visualization
(top) can be simplified using statistical
rankings, color-coding, and filtering
(bottom).
should present the stack of filtered dimensions to users
in a coherent manner.
Integrating Statistics with Visualization
Even with filtering, sometimes certain phenomenon
cannot be found solely with visualization. Particularly
with large data sets, visualizations will not always
highlight important trends of the underlying data.
Statistical properties can be used to detect important
datapoints, relationships, and clusters. Statistical
analysis can aid the comprehension of visualizations by
numerically suggesting (or confirming) visual output.
Presenting boxplots, standard deviations, lower-
triangular matrices will greatly improve the exploratory
data analysis capibilitly of these websites.
When users are faced with data with many columns,
choosing which dimensions to plot in a scatterplot can
be quite tedious and challenging. The rank-by-feature
(RBF) framework, shown in Figure 1, suggests
statistically interesting pair-wise columns that can help
guide users to interesting phenomenon [5]. The
resulting scatterplots (not pictured) appear when a user
hovers offer each cell in the matrix. When users are
navigating stack charts, highlighting other similar
stacks in the pattern-finding spirit of TimeSearcher [2],
will help users overcome the overview displacement
distortions. When users are trying to interpret a
chaotic network visualization, color-coding and filtering
the nodes by centrality measurements in the spirit of
SocialAction [3] can increase comprehension.
Similarly, relevant statistical information can also be
displayed in scented widgets to further improve
navigation [10].
Although statistical techniques are even more
3
complicated to comprehend and use effectively, the
discoveries they can lead to can outweigh the cost of
instruction. Furthermore, in a collaborative
environment, users can partition effort by navigating in
their respective areas of statistical expertise. This
statistical information will also empower users filter out
statistically unimportant data, bringing simplicity to
initially overwhelming visualizations. Finally, having
statistical overviews of visual information will also help
users trust the resulting information, not allowing users
to maliciously hide or distort the visual representations.
Conclusion
In this paper, we speculate that a richer experience on
social data analysis websites can be had if more
attention is paid to the exploratory capabilities.
Advanced filtering techniques allow users to step
beyond overviews and take advanced paths to finding
insights. Additionally, integrating the visualizations
with statistical analysis can reduce the complexity of
complex visualizations while also guiding the users to
interesting gaps, outliers and patterns. While both of
these requirements suggest an increase in the
complexity of an interface, the richer explorative
capabilities can leverage the true power of the masses:
many explorative paths for many insights.
Citations
[1] Data360 Data360. (2007).
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Tools for Time Series Data Sets, Timebox Widgets
for Interactive Exploration. Information
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[3] Perer, A. and Shneiderman, B. Balancing Systematic
and Flexible Exploration of Social Networks. IEEE
Transactions on Visualization and Computer
Graphics, 12, 5 (2006), 693-700.
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[4] Perer, A. and Shneiderman, B. Systematic Yet Flexible

Discovery: Guiding Domain Experts through
Exploratory Data Analysis. (Under
Submission)(2007).
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Framework for Interactive Exploration of
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[8] Swivel Swivel. (2007).
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