Browsing by Author "Abdul-Rahman, Alfie"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    A Design Study of Visualizing Historical Book Movement
    (The Eurographics Association, 2022) Xing, Yiwen; Dondi, Cristina; Borgo, Rita; Abdul-Rahman, Alfie; Agus, Marco; Aigner, Wolfgang; Hoellt, Thomas
    Trading of 15th-century books is an area of great interest to historians. In this paper, we document the process behind an intensive design study and close collaboration with a domain expert on understanding crucial historical research questions, together with the result of the design study - BookTracker, a tool for mining and visualizing circulation and movement of the 15th-century book trade. The main contribution includes a summary of insights from the design study and BookTracker, a web application supporting historians in: (i) query-based search of user-defined path sequences, and (ii) analysis of the movement of the resulting user-defined path sequences through multiple visualization techniques. We discuss and summarize the value and logistics of conducting this design study, which could become generalizable lessons for the visualization design methodology.
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    Exploring Interpersonal Relationships in Historical Voting Records
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2023) Cantareira, Gabriel Dias; Xing, Yiwen; Cole, Nicholas; Borgo, Rita; Abdul-Rahman, Alfie; Bujack, Roxana; Archambault, Daniel; Schreck, Tobias
    Historical records from democratic processes and negotiation of constitutional texts are a complex type of data to navigate due to the many different elements that are constantly interacting with one another: people, timelines, different proposed documents, changes to such documents, and voting to approve or reject those changes. In particular, voting records can offer various insights about relationships between people of note in that historical context, such as alliances that can form and dissolve over time and people with unusual behavior. In this paper, we present a toolset developed to aid users in exploring relationships in voting records from a particular domain of constitutional conventions. The toolset consists of two elements: a dataset visualizer, which shows the entire timeline of a convention and allows users to investigate relationships at different moments in time via dimensionality reduction, and a person visualizer, which shows details of a given person's activity in that convention to aid in understanding the behavior observed in the dataset visualizer. We discuss our design choices and how each tool in those elements works towards our goals, and how they were perceived in an evaluation conducted with domain experts.
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    Unveiling the Dispersal of Historical Books from Religious Orders
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Xing, Yiwen; Yan, Dengyi; Dondi, Cristina; Borgo, Rita; Abdul-Rahman, Alfie; Gillmann, Christina; Krone, Michael; Lenti, Simone
    In this paper, we introduce a visualization prototype designed to assist historians in exploring the dispersal of books from religious orders throughout Europe during the sixteenth century and beyond. The prototype is the result of a collaboration between visualization researchers and a historical book researcher, aiming to apply visualization techniques to address realworld domain challenges. Over two months, we engaged in an intensive collaboration with the domain expert to analyze domain issues and requirements and subsequently developed a prototype featuring two interfaces. Weekly discussions with the domain expert guided design and ongoing prototype evaluation. In its infancy, the prototype shows promise for enhancement and scalability. Future efforts will target systematic usability and practicality evaluations.
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    VisGuided: A Community-driven Approach for Education in Visualization
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Diehl, Alexandra; Firat, Elif E.; Torsney-Weir, Thomas; Abdul-Rahman, Alfie; Bach, Benjamin; Laramee, Robert; Pajarola, Renato; Chen, Min; Sousa Santos, Beatriz and Domik, Gitta
    We propose a novel educational approach for teaching visualization, using a community-driven and participatory methodology that extends the traditional course boundaries from the classroom to the broader visualization community.We use a visualization community project, VisGuides, as the main platform to support our educational approach. We evaluate our new methodology by means of three use cases from two different universities. Our contributions include the proposed methodology, the discussion on the outcome of the use cases, the benefits and limitations of our current approach, and a reflection on the open problems and noteworthy gaps to improve the current pedagogical techniques to teach visualization and promote critical thinking. Our findings show extensive benefits from the use of our approach in terms of the number of transferable skills to students, educational resources for educators, and additional feedback for research opportunities to the visualization community.