Difference Map Readability for Dynamic Graphs

Daniel Archambault (1) , Helen Purchase (2) , Bruno Pinaud (3, 4)

1 Clique - Clique Strategic Research Cluster
2 Department of Computing Science
3 GRAVITE - Graph Visualization and Interactive Exploration
4 LaBRI - Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique

Difference maps are one way to show changes between times- lices in a dynamic graph. They highlight, using colour, the nodes and edges that were added, removed, or persisted between every pair of adjacent timeslices. Although some work has used difference maps for visualization, no user study has been performed to gauge their performance. In this paper, we present a user study to evaluate the effectiveness of differ- ence maps in comparison with presenting the evolution of the dynamic graph over time on three interfaces. We found evidence that difference maps produced significantly fewer errors when determining the number of edges inserted or removed from a graph as it evolves over time. Also, difference maps were significantly preferred on all tasks.

Domains: Other [cs.OH]

Daniel Archambault, Helen Purchase, Bruno Pinaud. Difference Map Readability for Dynamic Graphs. 18th International Symposium on Graph Drawing, Sep 2010, Constance, Germany. pp.50-61, ⟨10.1007/978-3-642-18469-7_5⟩. ⟨inria-00514150⟩