CoCoNutTrix: Collaborative Retrofitting for Information Visualization

Petra Isenberg (1) , Anastasia Bezerianos (2) , Nathalie Henry (3) , Sheelagh Carpendale (4) , Jean-Daniel Fekete (5)

1 CPSC - Department of Computer Science [Calgary]
2 Ecole Centrale Paris
3 Microsoft Research [Redmond]
4 InnoVis
5 AVIZ - Analysis and Visualization

Most information visualization systems incorporate little or no specific support for collaboration. Yet, collaboration has been identified as a means to deal with the increasing amount and complexity of information available to analysts. Re-implementing existing applications to fully incorporate our current understanding of computer supported cooperative work could be exhaustive, time consuming, and expensive. As a first step, we explored how a co-located collaborative information visualization and analysis environment can be created in a cost-effective manner. We retrofitted NodeTrix, a social network analysis tool, by extending it to enable multi-user interaction in collaborative environments. We present details of the retrofitting process and results of a user study assessing the usability of our retrofitted system. Our results support the effectiveness of our low-cost collaborative retrofitting for collaborative network analysis and highlight implications for practitioners.

Domains: Human-Computer Interaction [cs.HC]

Petra Isenberg, Anastasia Bezerianos, Nathalie Henry, Sheelagh Carpendale, Jean-Daniel Fekete. CoCoNutTrix: Collaborative Retrofitting for Information Visualization. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 2009, Special Issue on Collaborative Visualization, 29 (5), pp.44--57. ⟨10.1109/MCG.2009.78⟩. ⟨hal-00690020⟩