Exploring Organizational Strategies in Immersive Computational Notebooks

TL;DR

This paper investigates how immersive environments influence organizational strategies in computational notebooks, revealing user preferences for spatial arrangements and increased non-linear analysis with larger notebooks.

Contribution

It explores organizational strategies in immersive computational notebooks, highlighting preferred spatial structures and the impact of scale on analysis approaches.

Findings

Participants preferred half-cylindrical spatial arrangements.

Users engaged more in non-linear analysis in immersive environments.

Larger notebooks led to more concurrent non-linear approaches.

Abstract

Computational notebooks, which integrate code, documentation, tags, and visualizations into a single document, have become increasingly popular for data analysis tasks. With the advent of immersive technologies, these notebooks have evolved into a new paradigm, enabling more interactive and intuitive ways to perform data analysis. An immersive computational notebook, which integrates computational notebooks within an immersive environment, significantly enhances navigation performance with embodied interactions. However, despite recognizing the significance of organizational strategies in the immersive data science process, the organizational strategies for using immersive notebooks remain largely unexplored. In response, our research aims to deepen our understanding of organizations, especially focusing on spatial structures for computational notebooks, and to examine how various execution orders can be visualized in an immersive context. Through an exploratory user study, we found participants preferred organizing notebooks in half-cylindrical structures and engaged significantly more in non-linear analysis. Notably, as the scale of the notebooks increased (i.e., more code cells), users increasingly adopted multiple, concurrent non-linear analytical approaches.