Design and Evaluation of Visualization Techniques to Facilitate Argument Exploration

This paper reports the design and comparison of three visualizations to represent structure content within arguments. Arguments are artifacts reasoning widely used across domains such as education, policy making, science. An argument is made up sequences statements (premises) which can support or contradict each other, individually in groups through Boolean operators. Understanding resulting hierarchical arguments while being able read arguments' text poses problems related overview, detail, navigation. Based on interviews with analysts we iteratively designed techniques, using combinations tree (sunburst, icicle), display (in-situ, tooltip) interactive Structured discussions show benefits these techniques; for example, sunburst good presenting overview but showing in-situ better than pop-ups. A controlleduser study 21 participants tasks shows complementary evidence suggesting that a pop-up best trade-off solution. Our results inform existing visualization tools increase visibility ‘novel-and-effective’ community.