B2: Bridging code and interactive visualization in computational notebooks
Name
3379337.3415851.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
4.12 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
c366f004ffe5accc4ed36d2d82019324
Author(s)
Wu, Y
Hellerstein, JM
Satyanarayan, A
Date Issued
2020
Journal
UIST 2020 - Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
Publisher
ACM
Citation
Wu, Y, Hellerstein, JM and Satyanarayan, A. 2020. "B2: Bridging code and interactive visualization in computational notebooks." UIST 2020 - Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2020 Owner/Author. Data scientists have embraced computational notebooks to author analysis code and accompanying visualizations within a single document. Currently, although these media may be interleaved, they remain siloed: interactive visualizations must be manually specified as they are divorced from the analysis provenance expressed via dataframes, while code cells have no access to users' interactions with visualizations, and hence no way to operate on the results of interaction. To bridge this divide, we present B2, a set of techniques grounded in treating data queries as a shared representation between the code and interactive visualizations. B2 instruments data frames to track the queries expressed in code and synthesize corresponding visualizations. These visualizations are displayed in a dashboard to facilitate interactive analysis. When an interaction occurs, B2 reifies it as a data query and generates a history log in a new code cell. Subsequent cells can use this log to further analyze interaction results and, when marked as reactive, to ensure that code is automatically recomputed when new interaction occurs. In an evaluative study with data scientists, we find that B2 promotes a tighter feedback loop between coding and interacting with visualizations. All participants frequently moved from code to visualization and vice-versa, which facilitated their exploratory data analysis in the notebook.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3379337.3415851
