Amy Rae Fox

Massachusetts Institute of Technology | MIT · Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Interactive visualizations are powerful tools for Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), but how do they affect the observations analysts make about their data? We conducted a qualitative experiment with 13 professional data scientists analyzing two datasets with Jupyter notebooks, collecting a rich dataset of interaction traces and think-aloud utterance...

Interactive visualizations are powerful tools for Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), but how do they affect the observations analysts make about their data? We conducted a qualitative experiment with 13 professional data scientists analyzing two datasets with Jupyter notebooks, collecting a rich dataset of interaction traces and think-aloud utterance...

Graph comprehension is the act of deriving meaning from graphs, an activity grounded in visuospatial reasoning that develops through a combination of instruction and practice. What we know about the mechanisms of graph comprehension stems from interleaving lines of inquiry in statistics, computer science, education, and psychology dating back to th...

What might a discipline of Visualization Psychology look like? If research on the psychological aspects of visualization were to coalesce, in the sense of a Lakatosian research program, what refutation-resistant theoretical commitments would magnetize its “hard core”? In this chapter, we argue that any interdisciplinary inquiry concerned with psych...

Students of visualization come to formal education with an abundance of personal experience. However, one's exposure to graphics through media and education may not be sufficiently diverse to appreciate the nuance and complexity required to design and evaluate effective representations. While many introductory courses in visualization address best...

What is a visualization? There is limited utility in trifling with definitions, except insofar as one serves as a tool for communicating and conceptualizing our subject matter; a statement of identity for a community. To establish Visualization Psychology as a viable inter-disciplinary research programme, we must first define the object(s) of our c...

The historical moment when a person worked in front of a single computer has passed. Computers are now ubiquitous and embedded in virtually every new device and system, connecting our personal and professional activities to ever-expanding information resources with previously unimaginable computational power. Yet with all the increases in capacity,...

The Burden of Selfhood is an interdisciplinary performance artwork exploring the intersection of feminism, identity and technology. By connecting methods from cognitive science, music, poetry, video and performance art, we investigate the experience of viewing and being viewed as a gendered body. Technology has accelerated the recursive gaze to the...

How does one visually represent the use of time? We explored students’ use of graphical metaphors by asking undergraduates at a public French university to generate representations of their personal time-use including: activities, sequence, duration, timing, and frequency. The resulting use of space and form was analyzed by way of an iteratively de...