We present Roslingifier, a data-driven storytelling method for animated scatterplots. Like its namesake, Hans Rosling (1948--2017), a professor of public health and a spellbinding public speaker, Roslingifier turns a sequence of entities changing over time---such as countries and continents with their demographic data---into an engaging narrative telling the story of the data. This data-driven storytelling method with an in-person presenter is a new genre of storytelling technique and has never been studied before. In this paper, we aim to define a design space for this new genre---data presentation---and provide a semi-automated authoring tool for helping presenters create quality presentations. From an in-depth analysis of video clips of presentations using interactive visualizations, we derive three specific techniques to achieve this: natural language narratives, visual effects that highlight events, and temporal branching that changes playback time of the animation. Our implementation of the Roslingifier method is capable of identifying and clustering significant movements, automatically generating visual highlighting and a narrative for playback, and enabling the user to customize. From two user studies, we show that Roslingifier allows users to effectively create engaging data stories and the system features help both presenters and viewers find diverse insights.

We present VASA, a visual analytics platform consisting of a desktop application, a component model, and a suite of distributed simulation components for modeling the impact of societal threats such as weather, food contamination, and traffic on critical infrastructure such as supply chains, road networks, and power grids. Each component encapsulates a high-fidelity simulation model that together form an asynchronous simulation pipeline: a system of systems of individual simulations with a common data and parameter exchange format. At the heart of VASA is theWorkbench, a visual analytics application providing three distinct features: (1) low-fidelity approximations of the distributed simulation components using local simulation proxies to enable analysts to interactively configure a simulation run; (2) computational steering mechanisms to manage the execution of individual simulation components; and (3) spatiotemporal and interactive methods to explore the combined results of a simulation run. We showcase the utility of the platform using examples involving supply chains during a hurricane as well as food contamination in a fast food restaurant chain.

We introduce WordBridge, a novel graph-based visualization technique for showing relationships between entities in text corpora. The technique is a node-link visualization where both nodes and links are tag clouds. Using these tag clouds, WordBridge can reveal relationships by representing not only entities and their connections, but also the nature of their relationship using representative keywords for nodes and edges. In this paper, we apply the technique to an interactive web-based visual analytics environment---Apropos---where a user can explore a text corpus using WordBridge. We validate the technique using several case studies based on document collections such as intelligence reports, co-authorship networks, and works of fiction.

We present an evaluation of text entry methods for tabletop displays given small display space allocations, an increasingly important design constraint as tabletops become collaborative platforms. Small space is already a requirement of mobile text entry methods, and these can often be easily ported to tabletop settings. The purpose of this work is to determine whether these mobile text entry methods are equally useful for tabletop displays, or whether there are unique aspects of text entry on large, horizontal surfaces that influence design. Our evaluation consists of two studies designed to elicit differences between the mobile and tabletop domains. Results show that standard soft keyboards perform best, even at small space allocations. Furthermore, occlusion-reduction methods like Shift do not yield significant improvements to text entry; we speculate that this is due to the low ratio of resolution per surface units (i.e., DPI) for current tabletops.