A Survey on Annotations in Information Visualization: Empirical Insights, Applications, and Challenges

TL;DR

A comprehensive survey on the use of annotations in information visualizations highlights their crucial role in improving audience understanding and engagement with visual data, and identifies existing research gaps and proposes potential future research directions.

Abstract

We present a comprehensive survey on the use of annotations in information visualizations, highlighting their crucial role in improving audience understanding and engagement with visual data. Our investigation encompasses empirical studies on annotations, showcasing their impact on user engagement, interaction, comprehension, and memorability across various contexts. We also study the existing tools and techniques for creating annotations and their diverse applications, enhancing the understanding of both practical and theoretical aspects of annotations in data visualization. Additionally, we identify existing research gaps and propose potential future research directions, making our survey a valuable resource for researchers, visualization designers, and practitioners by providing a thorough understanding of the application of annotations in visualization.

Figures (9)

• Figure 1: The chart of publications discussing the importance, application, and tools facilitating annotations in visualizations by year illustrates a noteworthy increase.
• Figure 2: Connected scatterplot from the New York Times showing the correlation between oil prices and consumption (1964–2007) 10.1111/j.1740-9713.2012.00605.x. Key events are annotated with text, rectangles, and arrows.
• Figure 3: Prisma Framework for literature selection.
• Figure 4: The design space by Rahman et al. rahman2024qualitative includes three sections: Why? identifies visualization tasks and relevant annotation types, How? details annotation usage with a frequency color-coding system: 6-25%, 26-50%, 51+%, and types of annotation ensembles, and What? categorizes annotation data sources.
• Figure 5: (A) and (B) are examples of professionally annotated charts: (A) A bar chart from The Wall Street JournalDapenaSantilli2021 highlighting inflation during COVID-19 with text, arrows, and highlighted region annotations; (B) A line chart from The New York TimesTravelliCai2023 comparing fertility rates of India and China, use text annotations and highlights for emphasis. (C), (D), and (E) are collected from internet rahman2024qualitative: (C) A bar chart uses connectors, indicators, enclosures, and text annotations to facilitate comparison; (D) A node-link diagram uses enclosures and geometric annotations to identify areas of interest; (E) A scatterplot utilizes text, connectors, and enclosures to highlight data points.