Visualizing the analysis process: CZSaw's History View

Capturing and visualizing the data analysis process is a growing research domain. Visual Analytics tool designers try to understand the analysis process in order to provide better tools. Existing research in process visualization suggests that capturing and visualizing the history of the analysis process is an effective form of process visualization. CZSaw is a Visual Analytics tool that provides visual representations of both data and the analysis process. In this thesis, we discuss the design and development of CZSaw’s History View, a method we have designed and developed to capture and visualize the history of data exploration sessions with CZSaw. Our goal is to understand how analysts employ visual history in the analysis process. Achieving this goal helps us in providing better support for analysts. We conducted an informal user study based on which, we have developed a list of user expectations and suggestions for history visualization.