Browsing by Author "Roberts, Jonathan C."

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    3D Visualisations Should Not be Displayed Alone - Encouraging a Need for Multivocality in Visualisation
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Roberts, Jonathan C.; Mearman, Joseph W.; Butcher, Peter W. S.; Al-Maneea, Hayder M.; Ritsos, Panagiotis D.; Xu, Kai and Turner, Martin
    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 TV, types of magazines, pictures on the wall, tells us much about the occupiers: their occupation, standards of living, taste in design, whether they have kids, and so on. How can we similarly create rich and diverse 3D visualisation presentations? How can we create visualisations that allow people to understand different stories from the data? In a multivariate 2D visualisation a developer may coordinate and link many views together to provide exploratory visualisation functionality. But how can this be achieved in 3D and in immersive visualisations? Different visualisation types, each have specific uses, and each has the potential to tell or evoke a different story. Through several use-cases, we discuss challenges of 3D visualisation, and present our argument for concurrent and coordinated visualisations of alternative styles, and encourage developers to consider using alternative representations with any 3D view, even if that view is displayed in a virtual, augmented or mixed reality setup.
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    Crafting Visual Narratives: A Case Study on Developing an Engaging Visualisation Poster Using U.S. Immigration Data
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Ogbonda, Ebube Glory; Butcher, Peter W. S.; Roberts, Jonathan C.; Vangorp, Peter; Hunter, David
    This paper presents a design study that elucidates the process of creating an engaging visualisation poster using U.S. immigration data as the focal point. The primary objective is to demonstrate the methodical journey of crafting a compelling story from raw data and effectively portraying it in a poster format. In the process, we manoeuvre through varied tactics of data display, visualisation tool implementation, and poster presentation. As a case study, we offer three important reflective insights that underscore our experience constructing such a poster, which is a practical guide for individuals pursuing similar endeavours. Key considerations underpinning this guide include prioritising a 'big hero' visualisation, ensuring a coherent narrative flow through the poster, and attentively curating the meta information to provide the necessary context, enabling the poster to communicate its message independently.
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    Critical Thinking Sheet (CTS) for Design Thinking in Programming Courses
    (The Eurographics Association, 2020) Roberts, Jonathan C.; Ritsos, Panagiotis D.; Romero, Mario and Sousa Santos, Beatrice
    We present a quick design process, which encourages learners to sketch their design, reflect on the main algorithm and consider how to implement it. In-depth design processes have their advantages, but often are not practical within the time given to the student, and may not fit the learning outcomes of the module. Without any planning students often jump into coding without contemplating what they will do, leading to failure or poor design. Our single-sheet method, allows the learners to critically think of the challenge and decompose the problem into several subproblems (the appearance, functionality and algorithmic steps of the solution). We have successfully used this technique for three years in a second year computer graphics module, for undergraduate degree students studying Computer Science. We present our method, explain how we use it with second year computer graphics students, and discuss student's experiences with the method
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    Interweaving Data and Stories: A Case Study on Unveiling the Human Dimension of U.S. Refugee Movements through Narrative Visualisation
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Ogbonda, Ebube Glory; Roberts, Jonathan C.; Butcher, Peter W. S.; Vangorp, Peter; Hunter, David
    In response to the escalating global refugee crisis, we present a case-study of developing an advanced tool for interpreting high-dimensional refugee data. Developed using Mapbox and D3.js, our interactive visualisation harmonises geographical and temporal dimensions of U.S. refugee data from the State Department's Refugee Processing Center. Our modular approach and robust data preprocessing enable seamless interactions among diverse visual components. The result is a narrative-driven visualisation that reveals broad immigration trends and individual refugee movements, fostering a nuanced and empathetic understanding of refugee dynamics. This work highlights the power of narrative visualisations in shaping policy decisions and promoting global discourse on the refugee crisis, marking a significant leap in data visualisation for refugee and immigration challenges.
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    Learning Activities in Colours and Rainbows for Programming Skill Development
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Roberts, Jonathan C.; Xu, Kai and Turner, Martin
    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 very fitting to be used as a positive iconic image at a time of much uncertainty. In this paper we explain how we have developed and organised the activities, focusing on colours, computer graphics and computer programming. Each lesson contains one or more activities, which enable people to take an active role in their learning.We have carefully prepared and organised several processes to guide academic colleagues to create and publish different activities in the theme. Which means that the activities appear similarly structured, can be categorised and searched in a consistent way. This structure can act as a blueprint for others to follow and apply to develop their own online course. The activities incrementally take people through learning about colour, rainbows, planning what to program, design and strategies to create colourful pictures using simple computer graphics principles based in processing.org.
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    Less is more: Focused Design and Problem Framing in Visualisation - Developing the ColloCaid Collocation Editor
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Roberts, Jonathan C.; Butcher, Peter W. S.; Rees, Geraint; Lew, Robert; Sharma, Nirwan; Frankenberg-Garcia, Anna; Vangorp, Peter; Hunter, David
    One of the challenges when developing a visualisation tool, especially at the start of a research project, is to amalgamate numerous requirements and various possibilities and decide what to create. With software development, it is too easy to incorporate all ideas, but quickly the tool becomes unusable, with feature overload. We reflect on designing and building the ColloCaid collocation visualisation editor, especially our conceptual focus on simplicity. We were inspired by Hemingway's iceberg theory of deliberate omission, to help frame the visualisation challenge and achieve clarity and focused design. The ColloCaid tool enables people to discover collocations, to help people improve vocabulary and fluency as they write. It was developed by a multidisciplinary team of applied linguists, lexicographers, human-computer interaction and visualisation experts. We promote focused design and problem solving, in visualisation, highlight concepts, including parti, design essence, and simplification. We provide a collection of insights that hold potential to evolve into a structured set of design guidelines, offering valuable direction to researchers.
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    Personalised Authentic assessments with Synchronous Learning Activities: a Framework for Teaching Visualisation and Graphics
    (The Eurographics Association, 2022) Roberts, Jonathan C.; Peter Vangorp; Martin J. Turner
    We present an activities framework for learning visualisation and computer graphics. The framework pivots around the academic developing an authentic learning scenario that is personalised for every student, followed by a suite of synchronous learning activities. The authentic assessment helps set the scene and motivate the learners, activities bring the students together to work on an aligned sub-task, while personalising the task enables each student to discuss their work without worrying about plagiarism. We demonstrate how we have applied the structure in two modules; first a third-year degree level module in computer graphics rendering and second an information visualisation masters module. In this paper we present the framework and discuss our experience with using it.
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    A Tool to Help lay out Multiple View Visualisations Guided by View Analysis
    (The Eurographics Association, 2020) Al-maneea, Hayder Mahdi; Roberts, Jonathan C.; Byška, Jan and Jänicke, Stefan
    In this paper, we present 'Layouts for Multiple View' (LMV), a tool that helps users build, control and save multiple view visualisations simply and easily using a bespoke grammar. The tool incorporates template multiple view layout strategies as quantified from prior research on view analysis, and the user can build different layouts by defining the grammar, or through the linked visual interface. LMV saves the multiple view layout as a JSON file, including all the details of the layout and attributes of the visualisation, which can be subsequently loaded and adapted or used to create dashboards. LMV guides the user to (i) design and control the multiple view layout, (ii) add data and allocate a specific visualisation technique for each view, and (iii) to adapt specific appearance properties of the layout.
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    Towards Developing a Digital application for the Five Design-Sheets Methodology
    (The Eurographics Association, 2022) Owen, Aron E.; Roberts, Jonathan C.; Peter Vangorp; Martin J. Turner
    The Five Design-Sheet Methodology is a sketching methodology that helps people ideate different designs; it has been used to develop computer interfaces, games and data visualisations. Traditionally, it is a paper-based process that structures the developer to think about their design solution over five sheets with five sections. However, with the rise of mobile phones and tablets, there is an emerging opportunity to achieve the sketched design ideation process in a digital form. This work investigates the transition of the Five Design-Sheets from a paper-based methodology into a digital sketching application. The paper introduces how we considered the challenge, and have started to develop an application. Currently our application implements the first sheet of the FdS process. We describe the application and present a brief evaluation of the work with designers and developers.
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    Visualising Collocation for Close Writing
    (The Eurographics Association, 2020) Roberts, Jonathan C.; Butcher, Peter W. S.; Lew, Robert; Rees, Geraint Paul; Sharma, Nirwan; Frankenberg-Garcia, Ana; Kerren, Andreas and Garth, Christoph and Marai, G. Elisabeta
    We present how we have developed a visualisation tool and text editor to display collocations for the purpose of close writing. Collocations are words that combine together in a natural way. Our design study approach brought together a collaboration of experts in lexicography, language learning, and visualisation, starting with low-fidelity prototypes before developing fuller functional systems. We studied the challenge of how to visualise collocations, such to help language learners write more effectively. We have co-created (i) an expert-curated dataset of over 30,000 collocations, (ii) developed a text-editor which performs word analysis, and recommends collocations, and (iii) created several in-situ visualisations linked to the editor, to help users visualise and lookup collocations, and view example sentences. Every stage of development has been evaluated with language learners and other potential users, which has positively improved its design and functionality.