Creation and Collaboration: Engaging New Audiences for Information Visualization - Information Visualization: Human-Centered Issues and Perspectives - page 122

(a) Collaborative activity might be introduced at any
phase of the information visualization pipeline.

(b) The sensemaking model in
[17] can be applied to identify
potential mechanisms for col-
laborative analysis (e. g., [43])

Fig. 3. Models of the Visualization Process.

Observations of social use of visualization have noted that visualization users
are attracted to data which they find personally relevant [45,96,100]. For ex-
ample, in collaborative visual analysis of the occupations of American workers
[46]), users often search for their own profession and those of their friends and
family, similar to how people search for names in the popular NameVoyager vi-
sualization [100]. The hypothesis is that by selecting data sets or designing their
presentation such that the data is seen as personally relevant, usage rates will
rise due to increased hedonic incentive. For example, geographic visualizations
may facilitate navigation to personally relevant locations through typing in zip
codes or city names, while a visualization of the United States' budget might
communicate how a specific user's taxes were allocated rather than only listing
total dollar amounts.
In the case of social-psychological incentives, the visibility of contributions
can be manipulated for social effects. Ling et al [56] found that users contributed
more if reminded of the uniqueness of their contribution or if given specific chal-
lenges, but not under other theoretically-motivated conditions. Cheshire [22] de-
scribes a controlled experiment finding that, even in small doses, positive social
feedback on a contribution greatly increases contributions. He also found that
visibility of high levels of cooperative behavior across the community increases
contributions in the short term, but has only moderate impact in the long term.
These studies suggest that social-psychological incentives can improve contribu-
tion rates, but that the forms of social visibility applied have varying returns.
One such incentive for visual analysis is to prominently display new discover-
ies or successful responses to open questions. Mechanisms for positive feedback,
such as voting for interesting comments, might also foster more contributions.
Finally, it is worth considering game play as an additional framework for
increasing incentives. In contrast to environments such as spreadsheets, many