VIStory: interactive storyboard for exploring visual information in scientific publications

• Published in: Journal of visualization Vol. 24; no. 1; pp. 69 - 84
• Main Authors: Zeng, Wei, Dong, Ao, Chen, Xi, Cheng, Zhang-lin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Germany Springer Nature B.V 01.02.2021; Springer Berlin Heidelberg
• Subjects: Datasets; Documents; Literature reviews; Metadata; Regular Paper; Scientific papers; Document visualization; Faceted metadata; Image browser
• ISSN: 1343-8875; 1875-8975
• DOI: 10.1007/s12650-020-00688-1

Many visual analytics have been developed for examining scientific publications comprising wealthy data such as authors and citations. The studies provide unprecedented insights on a variety of applications, e.g., literature review and collaboration analysis. However, visual information (e.g., figures) that is widely employed for storytelling and methods description are often neglected. We present , an interactive storyboard for exploring visual information in scientific publications. We harvest a new dataset of a large corpora of figures, using an automatic figure extraction method. Each figure contains various attributes such as dominant color and width/height ratio, together with faceted metadata of the publication including venues, authors, and keywords. To depict these information, we develop an intuitive interface consisting of three components: (1) Faceted View enables efficient query by publication metadata, benefiting from a nested table structure, (2) Storyboard View arranges paper rings-a well-designed glyph for depicting figure attributes, in a themeriver layout to reveal temporal trends, and (3) Endgame View presents a highlighted figure together with the publication metadata. We illustrate the applicability of with case studies on two datasets, i.e., 10-year IEEE VIS publications, and publications by a research team at CVPR, ICCV, and ECCV conferences. Quantitative and qualitative results from a formal user study demonstrate the efficiency of in exploring visual information in scientific publications.