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Lifelines: Visualizing Personal Histories

Lifelines: Visualizing Personal Histories. C. Plaisant, B.Milash, A. Rose, W.Widoff and B. Shneiderman ACM CHI ’96 http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/lifelines Presented by: Kartik C. Parija kartik@cs.umd.edu University of Maryland. Description.

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Lifelines: Visualizing Personal Histories

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  1. Lifelines: Visualizing Personal Histories C. Plaisant, B.Milash, A. Rose, W.Widoff and B. Shneiderman ACM CHI ’96 http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/lifelines Presented by: Kartik C. Parija kartik@cs.umd.edu University of Maryland CMSC 838B: Information Visualization

  2. Description • Introduces Lifelines as general visualization environment for personal histories • Medical and Court Records • Professional Histories • Various types of Biographical Data • Provides various examples of applications where records of personal histories are needed • Use of graphical time scales as an approach to visualize histories. [Time Scale + History = Intuitive] CMSC 838B: Information Visualization

  3. Description • Use of graphical time scales as an approach to visualize histories. [Time Scale + History = Intuitive] CMSC 838B: Information Visualization

  4. Description (Cont’d) • Emphasis on a one screen overview showing multiple facets of the records • Aspects with varying status are displayed as horizontal lines, while icons indicate discrete events. • Line color and thickness illustrate relationships or the significance of events. • Two Projects using Lifelines are covered in depth: • Records of the MD Department of Juvenile Justice • Viewing Medical Records • Video is worth a thousand Screen-dumps! CMSC 838B: Information Visualization

  5. Description (Cont’d) - DJJ CMSC 838B: Information Visualization

  6. Description (Cont’d) - DJJ CMSC 838B: Information Visualization

  7. Description (Cont’d) – Patient Records CMSC 838B: Information Visualization

  8. Description (Cont’d) – Patient Records CMSC 838B: Information Visualization

  9. Description (Cont’d) – Patient Records CMSC 838B: Information Visualization

  10. Description (Cont’d) • Demos: • http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/lifelines/latestdemo/kaiser.html • http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/lifelines/latestdemo/chi.html CMSC 838B: Information Visualization

  11. Description (Cont’d) - Experiment • Most users were very enthusiastic about the interface • Importance of the overview • Ease of access to details • Some were concerned about possible bias associated with the color and thickness coding • Recommendations made: • Ability to show future events • The need to be able to see exact dates • Marking of informal groups of related events CMSC 838B: Information Visualization

  12. Description (Cont’d) - Experiment CMSC 838B: Information Visualization

  13. Description (Cont’d) – Merits/Demerits • Advantages: • Reduce the chances of missing information • Facilitate the spotting of trends and anomalies • Streamline the access to details • Remain simple and tailorable to various applications • Disadvantages: • Limitations in record keeping can hamper effectiveness • Agreement on a data encoding scheme is difficult • Icons, color and thickness codes have to be chosen carefully • Development issues • Appropriate labeling of timelines – hard to optimize • Achieving smooth rescaling CMSC 838B: Information Visualization

  14. Contributions • Made a great case for necessity of appropriate visualization and navigation techniques to present and explore personal history records • Using previous ideas, “theoretical results”, intuition and software tools, produced LifeLines which seems a good starting point toward a standard personal history format • Provided 2 concrete real-world improvements to existing systems: DJJ and Medical Records • An Experiment was conducted which proved its effectiveness and identified some problem areas CMSC 838B: Information Visualization

  15. Notes on the References • Clearly Lifelines has used previous work very well. Not just ideas but software too: • Semantic Zooming • Elastic Windows • Treemaps (Hook Tool) • Related Work section presents a number of ideas justifying Lifelines approach to various issues CMSC 838B: Information Visualization

  16. Critique • Overall, I liked the paper: • Introduced the ideas • Sold me on its importance • Presented a product that mostly achieved what I thought it should have • A nice mix of published theories, intuition and software implementation • Admitted to its limitations and concluded by claming that the effort was a good starting point, which I think it is. • The experiment section was very interesting especially as there were so many recommendations made. • So a more statistical representation (atleast a table or a chart) may have strengthened the section • A reference to a paper that has covered the statistics of the experiment(s)? CMSC 838B: Information Visualization

  17. What has happened to LifeLines? • One of the HCIL Licensed Products • More work on using Lifelines for visualizing patient records • Enhanced Navigation • Analysis • More from the author a little later. • One more Video? CMSC 838B: Information Visualization

  18. Favorite Sentence • This task alone should be worth 20% of the Grade! • Forced to use “Academy Awards” type strategy: • Read and re-read paper … then read some more! • Come up with a nominations list • Pick a winner • So the nominees for “Favorite Sentence” are: ……… CMSC 838B: Information Visualization

  19. Favorite Sentence: The Nominations • “Decision making critically depends on gleaning the complete story, spotting trends, noting critical incidents or cause-effect relations, and reviewing previous actions.” • “Most importantly, large data sets can be displayed along the time line to help relate a story.” • “Lifelines offer and effective visualization tool, but reality often thwarts complete and immaculate record keeping.” • “Finally, techniques have been described to handle large records and to facilitate the associated window management, making LifeLines a useful starting point toward a standard personal history format.” CMSC 838B: Information Visualization

  20. Favorite Sentence: The Winner • And my Favorite Sentence is: • *drumroll* • “Most importantly, large data sets can be displayed along the time line to help relate a story.” • Justification: • Talks about LifeLines and its usefulness • It is really hard to relate a story (in general) and with large data sets it gets close to impossible • Story telling is very dear to the HCIL spirit! CMSC 838B: Information Visualization

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