ProvenanceWidgets: A Library of UI Control Elements to Track and Dynamically Overlay Analytic Provenance

TL;DR

ProvenanceWidgets is an open-source JavaScript library providing UI controls that track and visually overlay user interaction history, enhancing provenance awareness in analytic applications.

Contribution

It introduces modular UI control elements for real-time provenance tracking and visualization, demonstrated through integration with existing widget libraries.

Findings

Enables effective implementation of custom provenance-tracking applications

Supports dynamic overlay visualization of user interaction history

Validated through case studies with visualization developers

Abstract

We present ProvenanceWidgets, a Javascript library of UI control elements such as radio buttons, checkboxes, and dropdowns to track and dynamically overlay a user's analytic provenance. These in situ overlays not only save screen space but also minimize the amount of time and effort needed to access the same information from elsewhere in the UI. In this paper, we discuss how we design modular UI control elements to track how often and how recently a user interacts with them and design visual overlays showing an aggregated summary as well as a detailed temporal history. We demonstrate the capability of ProvenanceWidgets by recreating three prior widget libraries: (1) Scented Widgets, (2) Phosphor objects, and (3) Dynamic Query Widgets. We also evaluated its expressiveness and conducted case studies with visualization developers to evaluate its effectiveness. We find that ProvenanceWidgets enables developers to implement custom provenance-tracking applications effectively. ProvenanceWidgets is available as open-source software at https://github.com/ProvenanceWidgets to help application developers build custom provenance-based systems.