iVoLVER

Sébastien Ferré, Uta Hinrichs

Overview

iVoLVER is a Web-based tool that allows users without programming expertise to create visualizations from raw data through a set of direct manipulation operators. Unlike other tools with similar aims, iVoLVER allows fairly free-form visualization construction, akin to what can be done with paper, pens, and cutouts, but supported through a digital medium. Data can be imported from webpages, text files, or images, and then transformed into shapes and pictures. Users are free to determine mappings between raw data and visual dimensions such as position, size, shape, transparency, and color. In this way, users can create visualizations that are not necessarily bound to conventional forms.

iVoLVER also allows creation of simple animations, and exporting/importing images to and from external editing tools, thus enabling further customization and integration in various documents and web pages. Finally, we discuss usage and expressive possibilities in a series of examples using different types of data, giving evidence of feasibility of use through a formative evaluation.

You can access the iVoLVER tool at: http://ivolver.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk

Publications

Bongshin Lee, Nathalie Henry Riche, Petra Isenberg, Sheelagh Carpendale. iVoLVER: Interactive Visual Language for Visualization Extraction and Reconstruction. In Proc. CHI 2016.

Sébastien Ferré, Uta Hinrichs. iVoLVER: A Direct-Manipulation Tool for Constructing Data Visualizations. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

http://ivolver.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk