An individual-centered approach to visualize people’s opinions and demographic informationc

Book excerpt: The noble way to substantiate decisions that affect many people is to ask these people for their opinions. For governments that run whole countries, this means asking all citizens for their views to consider their situations and needs. Organizations such as Africa's Voices Foundation, who want to facilitate communication between decision-makers and citizens of a country, have difficulty mediating between these groups. To enable understanding, statements need to be summarized and visualized. Accomplishing these goals in a way that does justice to the citizens' voices and situations proves challenging. Standard charts do not help this cause as they fail to create empathy for the people behind their graphical abstractions. Furthermore, these charts do not create trust in the data they are representing as there is no way to see or navigate back to the underlying code and the original data. To fulfill these functions, visualizations would highly benefit from interactions to explore the displayed data, which standard charts often only limitedly provide. To help improve the understanding of people's voices, we developed and categorized 80 ideas for new visualizations, new interactions, and better connections between different charts, which we present in this report. From those ideas, we implemented 10 prototypes and two systems that integrate different visualizations. We show that this integration allows consistent appearance and behavior of visualizations. The visualizations all share the same main concept: representing each individual with a single dot. To realize this idea, we discuss technologies that efficiently allow the rendering of a large number of these dots. With these visualizations, direct interactions with representations of individuals are achievable by clicking on them or by dragging a selection around them. This direct interaction is only possible with a bidirectional connection from the visualization to the data it displays. We discuss different strategies for bidirectional mappings and the trade-offs involved. Having unified behavior across visualizations enhances exploration. For our prototypes, that includes grouping, filtering, highlighting, and coloring of dots. Our prototyping work was enabled by the development environment Lively4. We explain which parts of Lively4 facilitated our prototyping process. Finally, we evaluate our approach to domain problems and our developed visualization concepts. Our work provides inspiration and a starting point for visualization development in this domain. Our visualizations can improve communication between citizens and their government and motivate empathetic decisions. Our approach, combining low-level entities to create visualizations, provides value to an explorative and empathetic workflow. We show that the design space for visualizing this kind of data has a lot of potential and that it is possible to combine qualitative and quantitative approaches to data analysis.