Contour Line Stylization to Visualize Multivariate Information
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contour plots are widely used in geospatial data visualization as they provide natural interpretation of information across spatial scales. To compare a geospatial attribute against others, contour plots for the base attribute (e.g., elevation) are often overlaid, blended, or examined side by side with other attributes (e.g., temperature or pressure). Such visual inspection is challenging since overlay and color blending both clutter the visualization, and a side-by-side arrangement requires users to mentally integrate the information from different plots. Therefore, these approaches become less efficient as the number of attributes grows. In this paper we examine the fundamental question of whether the base contour lines, which are already present in the map space, can be leveraged to visualize how other attributes relate to the base attribute. We present five different designs for stylizing contour lines, and investigate their interpretability using three crowdsourced studies. Our first two studies examined how contour width and number of contour intervals affect interpretability, using synthetic datasets where we controlled the underlying data distribution. We then compared the designs in a third study that used both synthetic and real-world meteorological data. Our studies show the effectiveness of stylizing contour lines to enrich the understanding of how different attributes relate to the reference contour plot, reveal trade-offs among design parameters, and provide designers with important insights into the factors that influence interpretability.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.043 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.002 |
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".