Exploring Interactive Linking Between Text and Visualization

Abstract

Visualizations are included in documents as augmentation to text and they become more intuitive if readers have the ability to interact with them. Modern web technologies facilitate the development of interactive documents including both text and visualizations. The aim of this research it to explore the design space of possible visualization-text linking and interactions based on various triggers such as mouse events. We describe a framework that takes text containing markup, a related dataset, and a configuration file as inputs and produces an interactive document. The resulting document provides interactions such as details on demand, visual highlighting and comparison, and bushing-and-linking. In addition to regular sized graphics, the use of word-sized graphics or sparklines presents related content in view-focus of the reader. Finally, an illustrative example is presented to showcase the approach.