Not As Easy As You Think -- Experiences and Lessons Learnt from Trying to Create a Bottom-Up Visualization Image Typology

Han-Wei Shen; Jian Chen; Michael Sedlmair; Petra Isenberg; Robert S. Laramee; Tobias Isenberg; Torsten Moeller

Not As Easy As You Think -- Experiences and Lessons Learnt from Trying to Create a Bottom-Up Visualization Image Typology

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arxiv 2209.07533 v2 pith:ZFXIT4TK submitted 2022-09-15 cs.GR cs.MM

Jian Chen , Petra Isenberg , Robert S. Laramee , Tobias Isenberg , Michael Sedlmair , Torsten Moeller , Han-Wei Shen This is my paper

classification cs.GRcs.MM

keywords imagevisualizationimagestypologyanalysiscategorizationcommunityfacilitate

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We present and discuss the results of a two-year qualitative analysis of images published in IEEE Visualization (VIS) papers. Specifically, we derive a typology of 13 visualization image types, coded to distinguish visualizations and several image characteristics. The categorization process required much more time and was more difficult than we initially thought. The resulting typology and image analysis may serve a number of purposes: to study the evolution of the community and its research output over time, to facilitate the categorization of visualization images for the purpose of teaching, to identify visual designs for evaluation purposes, or to enable progress towards standardization in visualization. In addition to the typology and image characterization, we provide a dataset of 6,833 tagged images and an online tool that can be used to explore and analyze the large set of tagged images. We thus facilitate a discussion of the diverse visualizations used and how they are published and communicated in our community.

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Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. OpenAlex reports about 4 citations worldwide. Full citation record

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cs.HC 2026-08 accept novelty 6.0 of 10

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