Jonathan C. Roberts

Bangor University · School of Computer Science

Visualisation design requires critical thought: to understand important facets, investigate design suitability and explore alternatives. But, especially for learners, it can be difficult to structure a critical reflection of creative solutions. We introduce the Critical Design Survey (CDS): structured method that facilitates visualisation design an...

Visualisation is a powerful tool for presenting complex data, but challenges of inspiration and ideation can hinder the creative process of designing compelling visualisations. We developed VisDice, a novel tool for stimulating creative thought and inspiring alternative design ideas to address this. By introducing randomness, VisDice prompts design...

This paper is a call to action for research and discussion on data visualization education. As visualization evolves and spreads through our professional and personal lives, we need to understand how to support and empower a broad and diverse community of learners in visualization. Data Visualization is a diverse and dynamic discipline that combine...

This paper is a call to action for research and discussion on data visualization education. As visualization evolves and spreads through our professional and personal lives, we need to understand how to support and empower a broad and diverse community of learners in visualization. Data Visualization is a diverse and dynamic discipline that combine...

This workshop focuses on visualization education, literacy, and activities. It aims to streamline previous efforts and initiatives of the visualization community to provide a format for education and engagement practices in visualization. It intends to bring together junior and senior scholars to share research and experience and to discuss novel a...

This paper draws together nine strategies for creative visualization activities. Teaching visualization often involves running learning activities where students perform tasks that directly support one or more topics that the teacher wishes to address in the lesson. As a group of educators and researchers in visualization, we reflect on our learnin...

We report on an ongoing collaboration between epidemiological modellers and visualization researchers by documenting and reflecting upon knowledge constructs—a series of ideas, approaches and methods taken from existing visualization research and practice—deployed and developed to support modelling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Structured independent c...

We present our experience with developing active learning activities in a collaborative teacher setting, along with guidelines for teachers to create them. We focus on developing learner skills in colours, design, and visualisation. Typically, teachers create content before considering learning tasks. In contrast, we develop them concurrently. In a...

We report on an ongoing collaboration between epidemiological modellers and visualization researchers by documenting and reflecting upon knowledge constructs -- a series of ideas, approaches and methods taken from existing visualization research and practice -- deployed and developed to support modelling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Structured indepen...

The effort for combating the COVID-19 pandemic around the world has resulted in a huge amount of data, e.g., from testing, contact tracing, modelling, treatment, vaccine trials, and more. In addition to numerous challenges in epidemiology, healthcare, biosciences, and social sciences, there has been an urgent need to develop and provide visualisati...

The opportunities for 3D visualisations are huge. People can be immersed inside their data, interface with it in natural ways, and see it in ways that are not possible on a traditional desktop screen. Indeed, 3D visualisations, especially those that are immersed inside head-mounted displays are becoming popular. Much of this growth is driven by the...

Describes the above-named upcoming special issue or section. May include topics to be covered or calls for papers.

Administrative justice concerns the relationships between individuals and the state. It includes redress and complaints on decisions of a child's education, social care, licensing, planning, environment, housing and homelessness. However, if someone has a complaint or an issue, it is challenging for people to understand different possible redress p...

We believe that 3D visualisations should not be used alone; by coincidentally displaying alternative views the user can gain the best understanding of all situations. The different presentations signify manifold meanings and afford different tasks. Natural 3D worlds implicitly tell many stories. For instance, walking into a living room, seeing the...

We present how we have created a series of bilingual (English and Welsh) STEM activities focusing on rainbows, colours, light and optical effects. The activities were motivated by the many rainbows that appeared in windows in the UK, in support of the National Health Service at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Rainbows are hopeful and are ver...

Administrative justice concerns the relationships between individuals and the state. It includes redress and complaints on decisions of a child's education, social care, licensing, planning, environment, housing and homelessness. However, if someone has a complaint or an issue, it is challenging for people to understand different possible redress p...

The effort for combating the COVID-19 pandemic around the world has resulted in a huge amount of data, e.g., from testing, contact tracing, modelling, treatment, vaccine trials, and more. In addition to numerous challenges in epidemiology, healthcare, biosciences, and social sciences, there has been an urgent need to develop and provide visualisati...

Multiple-view visualization (MV) is a layout design technique often employed to help users see a large number of data attributes and values in a single cohesive representation. Because of its generalizability, the MV design has been widely adopted by the visualization community to help users examine and interact with large, complex, and high-dimens...

Multiple-view visualization (MV) is a layout design technique often employed to help users see a large number of data attributes and values in a single cohesive representation. Because of its generalizability, the MV design has been widely adopted by the visualization community to help users examine and interact with large, complex, and high-dimens...

The theme selected for the 2019 EuroCALL conference held in Louvain-la-Neuve was ‘CALL and complexity’. As languages are known to be intrinsically and linguistically complex, as are the many determinants of learning (additional) languages, complexity is viewed as a challenge to be embraced collectively. The 2019 conference allowed us to pay tribute...

We report on an in‐depth corpus linguistic study on ‘multiple views’ terminology and word collocation. We take a broad interpretation of these terms, and explore the meaning and diversity of their use in visualisation literature. First we explore senses of the term ‘multiple views’ (e.g., ‘multiple views’ can mean juxtaposition, many viewport proje...

While visual cues are traditionally used for visual analytics, multimodal interaction technologies offer many new possibilities. This chapter explores the opportunities and challenges for developers and users to utilize and represent data through non-visual sensory channels to help them understand and interact with data. Users are able to experienc...

Corpora have given rise to a wide range of lexicographic resources aimed at helping novice users of academic English with their writing. This includes academic vocabulary lists, a variety of textbooks, and even a bespoke academic English dictionary. However, writers may not be familiar with these resources or may not be sufficiently aware of the le...

Visualizations are nowadays appearing in popular media and are used everyday in the workplace. This democratisation of visualization challenges educators to develop effective learning strategies, in order to train the next generation of creative visualization specialists. There is high demand for skilled individuals who can analyse a problem, consi...

Planning by sketching is a powerful strategy. It allows you to think through different ideas and explore them on paper. The Five Design-Sheet (FdS) methodology provides a helpful structure for planning and designing interfaces. Ideas are brainstormed and sketched on the first sheet. Sheets 2, 3 and 4 capture three principal designs, and sheet 5 pre...

There are many situations when you need to plan and think through a range of different ideas, strategies, or courses of action. Often, your task is to find the right tools, or approach for a job and plan a solution to the problem at hand. In other situations is it useful to work through different permutations in your mind and decide which idea is t...

The ideology behind the first sheet is to explore many ideas, discover alternative solutions and define three potential ideas that will be further refined in the next three sheets. Through following the five stages of sheet 1, metaphorically you go on a journey. You will start with simple and undeveloped ideas and finish with three potential soluti...

The second, third and fourth sheets (the middle sheets) of the Five Design-Sheet method allow three designs to be explored in detail. Each sheet contains five parts: textual and reference information, sketches of what the tool or system would look like (the Big Picture), details of the components and operations of the design, and the Parti (the uni...

Especially for sheet 1, you need to articulate many alternative ideas. But, where do design ideas come from? How can you create something novel? What helps you be creative? All these are questions that psychologists, philosophers, artists and inventors have pondered in the past. While there may be no single answer to all these questions there are t...

When we are trying to solve a problem we often produce lots of ideas, for ways to solve it. Usually, we think through those alternative different ideas and the problem at hand, in order to get the best solution. Other times we may have an idea and we are trying to see if it could solve other problems. But what is a problem? What types of problems a...

As we sketch and draw our different solutions it is good to think how information can be communicated effectively. Each of the marks and graphics that we place on the page need to convey the ideas that we have in our mind. How do we display information effectively? How do we know that things are related? This chapter investigates how we as humans u...

This chapter focuses on developing the final design. The next steps are to decide on which of the three design ideas (from sheets 2, 3 and 4) to take forward, then develop the ideas further and add details to create a design realisation sheet. This sheet needs to include enough details to allow someone to understand the needs of the products and in...

Sketching is a powerful technique. Just the act of putting pen to paper, and working through many different design concepts helps you to work through the ideas in your mind. The sketches act as mini plans. They help you iron out some glitches before you spend time (and even waste time) to build the solution. It is an important part of the Five Desi...

Before, while and after putting pen to paper we need to think through the problem. There are a few very important questions as preparation that we need to consider: Can you? Should you? What if you? These are key questions that any software engineer and visualisation designer should be asking. For instance, we may ask ourselves whether there any et...

The Five Design-Sheet method can be used to plan a huge variety of interactive tools, interfaces and algorithms. It would be impossible to run through examples of every type. In this chapter, we focus on two example scenarios to demonstrate the full process. The first example explores different ways to capture and display heritage monuments. The se...

This book describes a structured sketching methodology to help you create alternative design ideas and sketch them on paper. The Five Design-Sheet method acts as a check-list of tasks, to help you think through the problem, create new ideas and to reflect upon the suitability of each idea. To complement the FdS method, we present practical sketchin...

Archaeological heritage is part of a global identity; the need to preserve this heritage is important, not only to the local communities in which it is present but also to national and international communities. In recent years, digital recordings of monuments and buildings have provided significant contributions in the preservation, presentation a...

The HeritageTogether project has developed a web platform through which members of the public can upload their own photographs of heritage assets to be processed into 3D models using an automated Structure-from-Motion work flow. The web platform is part of a larger project which aims to capture, create and archive digital heritage assets in conjunc...

By collecting images of heritage assets from members of the public and processing them to create 3D-reconstructed models, the HeritageTogether project has accomplished the digital recording of nearly 80 sites across Wales, UK. A large amount of data has been collected and produced in the form of photographs, 3D models, maps, condition reports, and...

A recent digital public archaeology project (HeritageTogether) sought to build a series of 3D digital models using photogrammetry from crowd-sourced images. The project saw over 13000 digital images being donated, and resulted in models of some 78 sites, providing resources for researchers, and condition surveys. The project demonstrated that digit...

Archaeologists are increasingly working with crowd-sourced digital data. Using evidence from other disciplines about the nature of crowd-sourcing in academic research, we suggest that archaeological projects using donated data can usefully be differentiated between generative projects (which rely on data collected by citizen scientists), and analyt...

Learners have personal data, such as grades, feedback and statistics on how they fair or compare with the class. But, data focusing on their personal learning is lacking, as it does not get updated regularly (being updated at the end of a taught session) and the displayed information is generally a single grade. Consequently, it is difficult for st...

Sketching designs has been shown to be a useful way of planning and considering alternative solutions. The use of lo-fidelity prototyping, especially paper-based sketching, can save time, money and converge to better solutions more quickly. However, this design process is often viewed to be too informal. Consequently users do not know how to manage...

One of the goals of network administrators is to identify and block sources of attacks from a network steam. Various tools have been developed to help the administrator identify the IP or subnet to be blocked, however these tend to be non-visual. Having a good perception of the wider network can aid the administrator identify their origin, but whil...

Network administrators often wish to ascertain where network attackers are located; therefore it would be useful to display the network map from the context of either the attacker's potential location or the attacked host. As part of a bigger project we are investigating how to best visualize contextual network data. We use a dataset of station adj...

In this position paper, we make an argument for the anthropomorphism of software agents as a persuasive tool. We begin by discussing some of the relevant applications, before providing a brief introduction to the CASA theory of social interaction with computers. We conclude by describing a selection of the evidence for anthropomorphism, and an argu...

Analysts wish to explore different hypotheses, organize their thoughts into visual narratives and present their findings. Some developers have used algorithms to ascertain key events from their data, while others have visualized different states of their exploration and utilized free-form canvases to enable the users to develop their thoughts. What...

Our goal is to help oceanographers to visualize and navigate their data over several runs. We have been using parallel coordinate plots to display every data value. Through our copy, cut, paste interactions we aim to enable users to drill-down into specific data points and to explore the datasets in a more expressive way. The method allows users to...

Visualization is coming of age: with visual depictions being seamlessly integrated into documents and data visualization techniques being used to understand datasets that are ever-growing in size and complexity, the term visualization is becoming used in everyday conversations. But we are on a cusp; visualization researchers need to develop and ada...

Lance felt a buzz on his wrist, as Alicia, his wearable, informed him via the bone-conduction ear-piece You have received an email from Dr Jones about the workshop. His wristwatch displayed an unread email glyph icon. Lance tapped it and listened to the voice of Dr Jones, talking about the latest experiment. At the same time he scanned through the...

Le roi est mort, vive le roi!; or The King is dead, long live the King was a phrase originally used for the French throne of Charles VII in 1422, upon the death of his father Charles VI. To stave civil unrest the governing figures wanted perpetuation of the monarchs. Likewise, while the desktop as-we-know-it is dead (the use of the WIMP interface i...

Heritage sites (such as prehistoric burial cairns and standing stones) are prolific in Europe; although there is a wish to scan each of these sites, it would be time-consuming to achieve. Citizen science approaches enable us to involve the public to perform a metric survey by capturing images. In this paper, discussing work-in progress, we present...

With the rise of digital content and web-based technologies, archaeologists and heritage organisations are increasingly striving to produce digital records of archaeology and heritage sites. The large numbers and geographical spread of these sites means that it would be too time-consuming for any one team to survey them. To meet this challenge, the...

In this paper we describe the HeritageTogether project, which is developing a web-based photogrammetry and archiving service focused on the megalithic monuments of Wales. The project aims to involve the community by crowdsourcing digital images of heritage assets for the construction of 3D models of the heritage assets. The digital archive will pro...

Visual Analytics interfaces allow ocean scientists to interactively investigate and compare different runs and parameterizations. However, oceanographic models are complex, temporal and the datasets that are generated are huge. Parallel Coordinate Plots can help explore multivariate data such as ocean-science data. Common issues with traditional PC...

Learning Analytics is the collection, management and analysis of students’ learning. It is used to enable teachers to understand how their students are progressing and for learners to ascertain how well they are performing. Often the data is displayed through dashboards. However, there is a huge opportunity to include more comprehensive and interac...

Heritage sites, objects and monuments are being scanned to preserve by record an archive of 3D models, with locations and other metadata. We have been using photogrammetry to survey various sites. We outline our methods and describe our techniques to create alternative depictions of different sites, described through two projects; one project we us...

Researchers wish to study the potential impact of sea level rise from climate change, and visual analytic tools can allow scientists to visually examine and explore different possible scenarios from simulation runs. In particular, hydrodynamic flux is calculated to understand the net movement of water; but typically this calculation is tedious and...

The digital camera has become ubiquitous. Every mobile phone has one built in, almost everyone has a mobile phone, and people use them constantly for all kinds of things, including taking pictures. In a new collaborative project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Bangor, Aberystwyth and Manchester Metropolitan Universities...

There are opportunities to display information in different ways. Node-link methods are common for multivariate networks, but there are a lot of other possibilities. To inspire new visualization techniques we look for novel visual metaphors for multivariate networks and discuss the data visual mapping process involving them, we discuss where ideas...

In this paper we describe the HeritageTogether project, which is developing a web-based photogrammetry and archiving service focused on the megalithic monuments of Wales. The project aims to involve the community by crowdsourcing digital images of heritage assets for the construction of 3D models of the heritage assets. The digital archive will pro...

Haptic Data Visualization (HDV) is a novel application of haptics. It provides functionality by which users touch and feel data, making it a useful tool for users with vision impairments. However, creating such visualizations usually requires programming knowledge, that support workers and tutors of blind users may not possess. To address this issu...

Parallel coordinates are a well-known and valuable technique for the analysis and visualization of high dimensional data sets. However, while Inselberg emphasizes that the strength of parallel coordinates as a methodology is rooted in exploration and interactivity, the set of interaction techniques is currently limited. Axes can be re-ordered and b...

With the rise in population migration there has been an increased need for professional interpreters who can bridge language barriers and operate in a variety of fields such as business, legal, social and medical. Interpreters require specialized training to cope with the idiosyncrasies of each field and their potential clients need to be aware of...

Haptic devices are becoming more widely used as hardware becomes available and the cost of both low and high fidelity haptic devices decreases. One of the application areas of haptics is haptic data visualization (HDV). HDV provides functionality by which users can feel and touch data. Blind and partially sighted users can benefit from HDV, as it h...

Haptic devices are becoming more widely used as hardware becomes available and the cost of both low and high fidelity haptic devices decreases. One of the application areas of haptics is haptic data visualization (HDV). HDV provides functionality by which users can feel and touch data. Blind and partially sighted users can benefit from HDV, as it h...

Augmented Reality technology has been used in medical visualization applications in various different ways. Haptics, on the other hand, are a popular method of interacting in Augmented and Virtual Reality environments. We present how reliance on standards benefits the fusion of these technologies, through a series of research themes, carried out in...

Augmented Reality technology has been used in medical visualization applications in various different ways. Haptics, on the other hand, are a popular method of interacting in Augmented and Virtual Reality environments. We present how reliance on standards benefits the fusion of these technologies, through a series of research themes, carried out in...

Augmented Reality technology has been used in medical visualization applications in various different ways. Haptics, on the other hand, are a popular method of interacting in Augmented and Virtual Reality environments. We present how reliance on standards benefits the fusion of these technologies, through a series of research themes, carried out in...

Augmented Reality technology has been used in medical visualization applications in various different ways. Haptics, on the other hand, are a popular method of interacting in Augmented and Virtual Reality environments. We present how reliance on standards benefits the fusion of these technologies, through a series of research themes, carried out in...

Augmented Reality technology has been used in medical visualization applications in various different ways. Haptics, on the other hand, are a popular method of interacting in Augmented and Virtual Reality environments. We present how reliance on standards benefits the fusion of these technologies, through a series of research themes, carried out in...

Close collaboration with other scientific fields is an important goal for the visualization community. Yet engaging in a scientific collaboration can be challenging. The physical sciences, namely astronomy, chemistry, earth sciences and physics, exhibit an extensive range of research directions, providing exciting challenges for visualization scien...

We present SitaVis, a visualization and situational awareness tool for the analysis of the health of a computer network. Network datasets are large and therefore we have developed an interactive framework that enables the dynamic exploration and interactive analysis of the data using aggregation techniques and Microsoft's XNA framework. Machine hea...

As international businesses adopt social media and virtual worlds as mediums for conducting international business, so there is an increasing need for interpreters who can bridge the language barriers, and work within these new spheres. The recent rise in migration (within the EU) has also increased the need for professional interpreters in busines...

Parallel coordinates is a popular and well-known multivariate data visualization technique. However, one of their inherent limitations has to do with the rendering of very large data sets. This often causes an overplotting problem and the goal of the visual information seeking mantra is hampered because of a cluttered overview and non-interactive u...

Data analysis often involves the comparison of complex objects. With the ever increasing amounts and complexity of data, the demand for systems to help with these comparisons is also growing. Increasingly, information visualization tools support such comparisons explicitly, beyond simply allowing a viewer to examine each object individually. In thi...

We present epSpread, an analysis and storyboarding tool for geolocated microblogging data. Individual time points and ranges are analysed through queries, heatmaps, word clouds and streamgraphs. The underlying narrative is shown on a storyboard-style timeline for discussion, refinement and presentation. The tool was used to analyse data from the VA...

The IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Conference continues to develop and grow. Each year brings new researchers to the field and produces important advances in the theory and practice of visual analytics. VAST is now in its sixth year, and it is the second year as an IEEE Conference. The presented work demonstrates significant gr...

In pay-per-bid auctions, placing a bid costs a fee, and only raises the price of the item by a small increment. At the conclusion of the auction, the last bidder wins, and the price paid by the winning bidder is subsidised by the bidding fees paid by unsuccessful bidders. In this short paper, the first publicly available analytics of data from a pa...

Virtual environments are often used for training. In particular, virtual worlds can be used for situation-awareness. Such models allow users to gain an understanding of a real-world location or walk-through scenarios that may incorporate many participants and achieve training to develop skills and competencies. One of the main challenges for the de...

We present a multiple coordinated view system VASTvis with a central view and several mini-views around the side. Each view is coordinated together, where operations are linked between windows. Furthermore, the user can perform sequential queries on the data through a series of brushing operations. The tool was used to analyse the VAST 2010 Mini Ch...

There are many different uses for haptics, such as training medical practitioners, teleoperation, or navigation of virtual environments. This review focuses on haptic methods that display data. The hypothesis is that haptic devices can be used to present information, and consequently, the user gains quantitative, qualitative, or holistic knowledge...

The use of haptic devices is becoming widespread, particularly with their growth in the home-games market and on mobile phones. Likewise, the number of haptic devices and APIs is increasing. However, it is still difficult to program and develop haptic applications. Consequently, there is a need to hide the complexity of programming a haptic applica...

We have been developing iCove: the interactive coastal oceanographic visualization environment. The challenge for the ocean scientists is that their models are complex and the datasets that are generated are huge. Furthermore, the oceanographers wish to interactively investigate and quantitatively compare different runs of these models. We propose...

It is sometimes difficult to teach fundamental aspects of computer graphics, especially pixel plotting techniques, as some students fail to engage with the material. In this paper we describe a constructionist approach to help students learn about fundamental computer graphics techniques. By getting the students to develop code that performs a grow...

Haptic data visualization is a growing research area. It conveys information using the sense of touch which can help visually impaired people or be useful when other modalities are not available. However, as haptic devices and virtual worlds exhibit many challenges, the haptic interactions developed are often simple and limited to navigation tasks,...

Haptics force-feedback technology is fast becoming a consumer product and no longer only found in research laboratories. The emergence of the budget Falcon device (Novint Technologies, Inc., USA) represents a key step in the dissemination of haptics technology as it offers this functionality to home users, in particular to games players. Haptics ha...

Scientific visualization has an important role in climate change analysis, especially by creating dynamic interactive environments. The earth sciences, such as oceanography, utilize many numerical models; experts wish to quickly try out different scenarios and explore various possible outcomes. However, many experts still rely upon two-dimensional...

Studies show that roughly one-third of searches that are performed on the Web require the user to initiate subsequent searches. Bates theorized that with every search the user will encounter new information, which in turn leads to new ideas and directions. This process causes a change, not simply in the query terms being used but also to the nature...