Lifelines: Visualizing Personal Histories

Feb 7th 2001CMSC 838B: Information

Visualization

Lifelines: Visualizing Personal Histories

C. Plaisant, B.Milash, A. Rose, W.Widoff and B. Shneiderman

ACM CHI ’96

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/lifelines

Presented by:

Kartik C. [email protected]

University of Maryland


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Description Introduces Lifelines as general visualization

environment for personal histories Medical and Court Records Professional Histories Various types of Biographical Data

Provides various examples of applications where records of personal histories are needed

Use of graphical time scales as an approach to visualize histories. [Time Scale + History = Intuitive]


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Description Use of graphical time scales as an approach to

visualize histories. [Time Scale + History = Intuitive]


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Description (Cont’d) Emphasis on a one screen overview showing

multiple facets of the records

Aspects with varying status are displayed as horizontal lines, while icons indicate discrete events.

Line color and thickness illustrate relationships or the significance of events.

Two Projects using Lifelines are covered in depth: Records of the MD Department of Juvenile Justice Viewing Medical Records

Video is worth a thousand Screen-dumps!


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Description (Cont’d) - DJJ


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Description (Cont’d) – Patient Records


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Description (Cont’d) Demos:

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/lifelines/latestdemo/kaiser.html

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/lifelines/latestdemo/chi.html


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Description (Cont’d) - Experiment Most users were very enthusiastic about the

interface Importance of the overview Ease of access to details

Some were concerned about possible bias associated with the color and thickness coding

Recommendations made: Ability to show future events The need to be able to see exact dates Marking of informal groups of related events


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Description (Cont’d) - Experiment


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Description (Cont’d) – Merits/Demerits Advantages:

Reduce the chances of missing information Facilitate the spotting of trends and anomalies Streamline the access to details Remain simple and tailorable to various applications

Disadvantages: Limitations in record keeping can hamper

effectiveness Agreement on a data encoding scheme is difficult

Icons, color and thickness codes have to be chosen carefully

Development issues Appropriate labeling of timelines – hard to optimize Achieving smooth rescaling


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Contributions Made a great case for necessity of appropriate

visualization and navigation techniques to present and explore personal history records

Using previous ideas, “theoretical results”, intuition and software tools, produced LifeLines which seems a good starting point toward a standard personal history format

Provided 2 concrete real-world improvements to existing systems: DJJ and Medical Records

An Experiment was conducted which proved its effectiveness and identified some problem areas


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Notes on the References Clearly Lifelines has used previous work very

well. Not just ideas but software too: Semantic Zooming Elastic Windows Treemaps (Hook Tool)

Related Work section presents a number of ideas justifying Lifelines approach to various issues


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Critique Overall, I liked the paper:

Introduced the ideas Sold me on its importance Presented a product that mostly achieved what I thought it

should have A nice mix of published theories, intuition and software

implementation Admitted to its limitations and concluded by claming that

the effort was a good starting point, which I think it is.

The experiment section was very interesting especially as there were so many recommendations made.

So a more statistical representation (atleast a table or a chart) may have strengthened the section

A reference to a paper that has covered the statistics of the experiment(s)?


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What has happened to LifeLines? One of the HCIL Licensed Products

More work on using Lifelines for visualizing patient records

Enhanced Navigation Analysis

More from the author a little later.

One more Video?


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Favorite Sentence This task alone should be worth 20% of the

Grade!

Forced to use “Academy Awards” type strategy: Read and re-read paper … then read some more! Come up with a nominations list Pick a winner

So the nominees for “Favorite Sentence” are:

………


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Favorite Sentence: The Nominations “Decision making critically depends on gleaning the

complete story, spotting trends, noting critical incidents or cause-effect relations, and reviewing previous actions.”

“Most importantly, large data sets can be displayed along the time line to help relate a story.”

“Lifelines offer and effective visualization tool, but reality often thwarts complete and immaculate record keeping.”

“Finally, techniques have been described to handle large records and to facilitate the associated window management, making LifeLines a useful starting point toward a standard personal history format.”


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Favorite Sentence: The Winner And my Favorite Sentence is:

*drumroll*

“Most importantly, large data sets can be displayed along the time line to help relate a story.”

Justification: Talks about LifeLines and its usefulness It is really hard to relate a story (in general) and

with large data sets it gets close to impossible Story telling is very dear to the HCIL spirit!

Lifelines: Visualizing Personal Histories

Documents

Transcript of Lifelines: Visualizing Personal Histories