ProvenanceWidgets: A Library of UI Control Elements to Track and Dynamically Overlay Analytic Provenance
Arpit Narechania - Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, United States
Kaustubh Odak - Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, United States
Mennatallah El-Assady - ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
Alex Endert - Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, United States
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Room: Bayshore V
2024-10-16T18:45:00ZGMT-0600Change your timezone on the schedule page
2024-10-16T18:45:00Z
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Keywords
Provenance, Analytic provenance, Visualization, UI controls, GUI elements, JavaScript library.
Abstract
We present ProvenanceWidgets, a Javascript library of UI control elements such as radio buttons, checkboxes, and dropdowns to track and dynamically overlay a user's analytic provenance. These in situ overlays not only save screen space but also minimize the amount of time and effort needed to access the same information from elsewhere in the UI. In this paper, we discuss how we design modular UI control elements to track how often and how recently a user interacts with them and design visual overlays showing an aggregated summary as well as a detailed temporal history. We demonstrate the capability of ProvenanceWidgets by recreating three prior widget libraries: (1) Scented Widgets, (2) Phosphor objects, and (3) Dynamic Query Widgets. We also evaluated its expressiveness and conducted case studies with visualization developers to evaluate its effectiveness. We find that ProvenanceWidgets enables developers to implement custom provenance-tracking applications effectively. ProvenanceWidgets is available as open-source software at https://github.com/ProvenanceWidgets to help application developers build custom provenance-based systems.