Uncovering Data Landscapes through Data Reconnaissance and Task Wrangling
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Domain experts are inundated with new and heterogeneous types of data and require better and more specific types of data visualization systems to help them. In this paper, we consider the data landscape that domain experts seek to understand, namely the set of datasets that are either currently available or could be obtained. Experts need to understand this landscape to triage which data analysis projects might be viable, out of the many possible research questions that they could pursue. We identify data reconnaissance and task wrangling as processes that experts undertake to discover and identify sources of data that could be valuable for some specific analysis goal. These processes have thus far not been formally named or defined by the research community. We provide formal definitions of data reconnaissance and task wrangling and describe how they relate to the data landscape that domain experts must uncover. We propose a conceptual framework with a four-phase cycle of acquire, view, assess, and pursue that occurs within three distinct chronological stages, which we call fog and friction, informed data ideation, and demarcation of final data. Collectively, these four phases embedded within three temporal stages delineate an expert's progressively evolving understanding of the data landscape. We describe and provide concrete examples of these processes within the visualization community through an initial systematic analysis of previous design studies, identifying situations where there is evidence that they were at play. We also comment on the response of domain experts to this framework, and suggest design implications stemming from these processes to motivate future research directions. As technological changes will only keep adding unknown terrain to the data landscape, data reconnaissance and task wrangling are important processes that need to be more widely understood and supported by the data visualization tools. By articulating a concrete understanding of this challenge and its implications, our work impacts the design and evaluation of data visualization systems.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.045 | 0.086 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".