Integrating Annotative Notes and Data in the Analysis Process

Analysts need to keep track of their analytic findings, observations, ideas, and hypotheses throughout the analysis process. While some visual analytics tools support such note taking needs, these notes are often represented as objects separate from the data and in a workspace separate from the data visualizations. Representing notes the same way as the data and integrating them with data visualizations can enable analysts to build a more cohesive picture of notes and data. We created a note taking functionality called CZNotes within the visual analytics tool CZSaw for analyzing unstructured text documents. CZNotes are designed to use the same model as the data and can thus be visualized in CZSaw's existing data views.We conducted a preliminary user study to observe the use of CZNotes and observed that CZNotes has the potential to support progressive analysis, to act as a shortcut to the data, and supports creation of new data relationships.