Expressive Authoring of Node-Link Diagrams with Graphies

Hugo Romat (1, 2) , Caroline Appert (1) , Emmanuel Pietriga (1)

1 ILDA - Interacting with Large Data - LISN
2 TecKnowMetrix

Expressive design environments enable visualization designers not only to specify chart types and visual mappings, but also to customize individual graphical marks, as they would in a vector graphics drawing tool. Prior work has mainly investigated how to support the expressive design of a wide range of charts generated from tabular data: bar charts, scatterplots, maps, etc. We focus here on an expressive design environment for node-link diagrams generated from multivariate networks. Such data structures raise specific challenges and opportunities in terms of visual design and interactive authoring. We discuss those specificities and describe the user-centered design process that led to Graphies, a prototype environment for expressive node-link diagram authoring. We then report on a study in which participants successfully reproduced several expressive designs, and created their own designs as well.

Mots clés: Index Terms-Expressive Design; Node-Link Diagram; Multivariate Networks

Domaines: Web; Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]

Hugo Romat, Caroline Appert, Emmanuel Pietriga. Expressive Authoring of Node-Link Diagrams with Graphies. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2021, 27 (4), pp.2329-2340. ⟨10.1109/TVCG.2019.2950932⟩. ⟨hal-02358999⟩