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Interactive Parallel Bargrams Demonstration
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What are
Bargrams?
“Bargrams,” a simple visualization charting type, are an extension to histograms, also known as bar charts. Bargrams are, in effect, histograms whose bars have been tipped over and lined up end-to-end. This kind of visual chart is now found in print in such venues as the New York Times, but there is no standard name that has been adopted into the vocabulary of visualization researchers or the general public. As far as we know, the name first appeared in print in a publication in 2001 in the ACM UIST conference by Wittenburg et al. mentioned below. What are Interactive
Parallel Bargrams?
Interactive Parallel Bargrams display a set of multiple dimensions or attributes as parallel bargrams and add such interactions as button selection for querying via attribute values or ranges. In addition to value buttons for querying, item vectors may be included above the bargrams to afford further interactions that are particularly useful for exploring data relationships through “pre-queries.” Such simple affordances are useful for consumers to support informed decision-making and narrowing down one’s choice in such domains as Internet shopping, investment decisions, college choice, and so on. What is
EZChooser?
EZChooser is a Java application incorporating interactive parallel bargrams that was developed at Verizon Laboratories and at one time deployed in the Consumer Guide section of Verizon’s Superpages. It won a JARS Top 5% award. An EZChooser help page explains how to interpret the basic visualization and shows examples of interactions. It is possible to upload your own data and view it through an EZChooser server. The data format is documented in detail here. Why is this
EZChooser demonstration at MERL?
Some of the researchers involved in the development of EZChooser are now at MERL. MERL has a license to EZChooser. It is made available on this server for noncommercial research and educational purposes. How can I get
more information?
Publication of record: Kent Wittenburg, Tom Lanning, Michael Heinrichs,
Michael Stanton. “Parallel Bargrams for Consumer-based Information
Exploration and Choice.” In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User
Interface Systems and Technology (UIST '01). See also: Chapter 6, Section 2 in Robert Spence, Information
Visualization: Design for Interaction, Second Edition, Pearson Education
Limited, Contact: Kent Wittenburg (wittenburg@merl.com). Proceed to EZChooser Demonstration...
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