On aesthetics for user-sketched layouts of vertex-weighted graphs
- PDF / 762,875 Bytes
- 15 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 77 Downloads / 217 Views
R E G UL A R P A P E R
Chun-Cheng Lin
•
Weidong Huang • Wan-Yu Liu • Chang-Yu Chen
On aesthetics for user-sketched layouts of vertexweighted graphs
Received: 1 July 2020 / Revised: 1 July 2020 / Accepted: 9 August 2020 The Visualization Society of Japan 2020
Abstract Recent empirical works on graph drawing have investigated visual properties of graph drawings created by users based on adjacency lists of graphs as well as drawing behaviors. This is mainly done by asking participants to sketch these graphs on a tablet computer so that they can freely express their interpretation. However, previous works did not consider weighted vertices, i.e., assigning a weight to a vertex to reflect its importance. Therefore, we conducted an empirical study on graphs with weighted vertices. More specifically, this work conducts an experiment and analyzes characteristics of the final graph layouts, participants’ drawing processes and strategies and their drawing preferences. Results indicated that minimizing the number of edge crossings was still the most important aesthetic for participants, and that participants preferred the aesthetic of creating grid-like drawings in the condition with weighted vertices. Hence, this work suggested that aesthetics of minimizing number of edge crossings and creating grid-like patterns should be the main consideration for designing a graph drawing software application. Keywords Graph drawing aesthetics Weighted vertex User-sketched graph drawing Information visualization
C.-C. Lin C.-Y. Chen Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 300, Taiwan E-mail: [email protected] C.-Y. Chen E-mail: [email protected] C.-C. Lin Department of Business Administration, Asia University, Taichung 413, Taiwan C.-C. Lin Department of Medical Research, China Medical University Hospital, China Medical University, Taichung 404, Taiwan W. Huang Faculty of Transdisciplinary Innovation, University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, NSW 2007, Australia E-mail: [email protected] W.-Y. Liu (&) Department of Forestry, National Chung Hsing University, Taichung 402, Taiwan E-mail: [email protected] W.-Y. Liu Innovation and Development Center of Sustainable Agriculture, National Chung Hsing University, Taichung 402, Taiwan
C.-C. Lin et al.
1 Introduction Early graph drawing algorithms (Batini et al. 1986; di Battista et al. 1994; Kant 1996) are usually designed to draw graphs to meet aesthetics that were proposed by algorithm designers based on their intuition. These designers claimed that graph drawings illustrated using their algorithms could be more easily understood and could help readers remember. However, graphs drawings are generated for users to understand the underlying graph data. Therefore, it is important to get end users involved to evaluate and validate the role of those aesthetics in making drawings effectively display and communicate data patterns and insights that are otherwise hidden in their original non-visual format. In conducting
Data Loading...
