DeLVE into Earth's Past: A Visualization-Based Exhibit Deployed Across Multiple Museum Contexts

TL;DR

This study introduces DeLVE, an interactive visualization exhibit designed to enhance deep time understanding in museums, examining how different museum contexts influence visitor engagement and learning outcomes.

Contribution

It presents a novel visualization idiom, Connected Multi-Tier Ranges, and evaluates its deployment across multiple museums, highlighting the impact of context on visitor interaction.

Findings

Visitor engagement varied significantly across museums.

Context influences how visitors interpret deep time visualizations.

DeLVE improved proportional reasoning about geological timescales.

Abstract

While previous work has found success in deploying visualizations as museum exhibits, it has not investigated whether museum context impacts visitor behaviour with these exhibits. We present an interactive Deep-time Literacy Visualization Exhibit (DeLVE) to help museum visitors understand deep time (lengths of extremely long geological processes) by improving proportional reasoning skills through comparison of different time periods. DeLVE uses a new visualization idiom, Connected Multi-Tier Ranges, to visualize curated datasets of past events across multiple scales of time, relating extreme scales with concrete scales that have more familiar magnitudes and units. Museum staff at three separate museums approved the deployment of DeLVE as a digital kiosk, and devoted time to curating a unique dataset in each of them. We collect data from two sources, an observational study and system trace logs. We discuss the importance of context: similar museum exhibits in different contexts were received very differently by visitors. We additionally discuss differences in our process from Sedlmair et al.'s design study methodology which is focused on design studies triggered by connection with collaborators rather than the discovery of a concept to communicate. Supplemental materials are available at: https://osf.io/z53dq/