ProvenanceWidgets: A Library of UI Control Elements to Track and Dynamically Overlay Analytic Provenance

TL;DR

ProvenanceWidgets addresses the need for space-efficient, real-time access to analytic provenance by providing in-situ UI overlays that track and visually summarize user interactions. The library offers modular UI controls that log frequency and recency, along with aggregated and temporal overlays, and can replicate prior widget families such as Scented Widgets, Phosphor objects, and Dynamic Query Widgets. Evaluation via developer case studies demonstrates expressiveness and practical viability for building custom provenance-tracking applications. Open-source at https://github.com/ProvenanceWidgets, the toolkit promises to streamline integration of provenance-aware workflows into visualization tools.

Abstract

We present ProvenanceWidgets, a Javascript library of UI control elements such as radio buttons, checkboxes, and dropdowns to track and dynamically overlay a user's analytic provenance. These in situ overlays not only save screen space but also minimize the amount of time and effort needed to access the same information from elsewhere in the UI. In this paper, we discuss how we design modular UI control elements to track how often and how recently a user interacts with them and design visual overlays showing an aggregated summary as well as a detailed temporal history. We demonstrate the capability of ProvenanceWidgets by recreating three prior widget libraries: (1) Scented Widgets, (2) Phosphor objects, and (3) Dynamic Query Widgets. We also evaluated its expressiveness and conducted case studies with visualization developers to evaluate its effectiveness. We find that ProvenanceWidgets enables developers to implement custom provenance-tracking applications effectively. ProvenanceWidgets is available as open-source software at https://github.com/ProvenanceWidgets to help application developers build custom provenance-based systems.