Visual Scaffolding in Integrated Spatial and Nonspatial Analysis

Abstract

Collaborative visual analytics that feature mixtures of spatial and nonspatial data occur across disciplines, and are particularly common in bioinformatics, neuroscience and geospatial analysis. In this work we analyze, from a human-centric perspective, data collected from the design and evaluation of three successful visual analysis tools, spanning seven case studies. We focus on the importance of the users' background to the design process, and we discuss the importance of visual scaffolding to such collaborative, integrated spatial and nonspatial visual analysis tools. Scaffolding is a psychology concept which denotes the support given during a learning process. We further present evidence that spatial and nonspatial coordinated views can serve as a form of visual scaffolding for expert-level, collaborative visual analyses.