publications

2021

1. Playing Design: A Case Study on Applying Gamification to Construct a Serious Game with Youngsters at Social Risk Benito-Santos, Alejandro, Dorn, Amelie, Gómez, Antonio G. Losada, Palfinger, Thomas, Sánchez, Roberto Therón, and Wandl-Vogt, Eveline Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage 2021 [Abs]

   This article reports on the experience of co-designing an educational video game aimed at promoting good dietary habits in youngsters and fostering Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), such as SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being), SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities), and SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals). To ensure the quality of the results, we developed a methodology under a social innovation paradigm that enabled the co-creation of the game. The methodology was driven by a series of three workshops, during which we adopted several different gamification strategies to support a Participatory Design (PD) process with the stakeholders, a group of local pre-teen and teen girls at social risk (N = 22). Captured requirements materialized into intermediate prototype evaluations that motivated a progressive refinement of the game.

2020

1. Supporting Methodology Transfer in Visualization Research with Literature-Based Discovery and Visual Text Analytics Benito Santos, Alejandro 2020 [Abs]

   [ES] La creciente especialización de la ciencia está motivando la rápida fragmentación de disciplinas bien establecidas en comunidades interdisciplinares. Esta descom- posición se puede observar en un tipo de investigación en visualización conocida como investigación de visualización dirigida por el problema. En ella, equipos de expertos en visualización y un dominio concreto, colaboran en un área específica de conocimiento como pueden ser las humanidades digitales, la bioinformática, la seguridad informática o las ciencias del deporte. Esta tesis propone una serie de métodos inspirados en avances recientes en el análisis automático de textos y la rep- resentación del conocimiento para promover la adecuada comunicación y transferen- cia de conocimiento entre estas comunidades. Los métodos obtenidos se combinaron en una interfaz de análisis visual de textos orientada al descubrimiento científico, GlassViz, que fue diseñada con estos objetivos en mente. La herramienta se probó por primera vez en el dominio de las humanidades digitales para explorar un corpus masivo de artículos de visualización de propósito general. GlassViz fue adaptada en un estudio posterior para que soportase diferentes fuentes de datos representativas de estas comunidades, mostrando evidencia de que el enfoque propuesto también es una alternativa válida para abordar el problema de la fragmentación en la investigación en visualización.

2. A Data-Driven Introduction to Authors, Readings, and Techniques in Visualization for the Digital Humanities Benito-Santos, A., and Sánchez, R. T. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 2020 [Abs]

   The newly rediscovered frontier between data visualization and the digital humanities has proven to be an exciting field of experimentation for scholars from both disciplines. This fruitful collaboration is attracting researchers from other areas of science who may be willing to create visual analysis tools that promote humanities research in its many forms. However, as the collaboration grows in complexity, it may become intimidating for these scholars to get engaged in the discipline. To facilitate this task, we have built an introduction to visualization for the digital humanities that sits on a data-driven stance adopted by the authors. In order to construct a dataset representative of the discipline, we analyze citations from a core corpus on 300 publications in visualization for the humanities obtained from recent editions of the InfoVis Vis4DH workshop, the ADHO Digital Humanities Conference, and the specialized digital humanities journal Digital Humanities Quarterly. From here, we extract referenced works and analyze more than 1900 publications in search of citation patterns, prominent authors in the field, and other interesting insights. Finally, following the path set by other researchers in the visualization and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) communities, we analyze paper keywords to identify significant themes and research opportunities in the field.

3. Defragmenting Research Areas with Knowledge Visualization and Visual Text Analytics Benito-Santos, Alejandro, and Therón Sánchez, Roberto Applied Sciences 2020 [Abs]

   The increasing specialization of science is motivating the fragmentation of traditional and well-established research areas into interdisciplinary communities of practice that focus on cooperation between experts to solve problems in a wide range of domains. This is the case of problem-driven visualization research (PDVR), in which groups of scholars use visualization techniques in different application domains such as the digital humanities, bioinformatics, sports science, or computer security. In this paper, we employ the findings obtained during the development of a novel visual text analytics tool we built in previous studies, GlassViz, to automatically detect interesting knowledge associations and groups of common interests between these communities of practice. Our proposed method relies on the statistical modeling of author-assigned keywords to make its findings, which are demonstrated in two use cases. The results show that it is possible to propose interactive, semisupervised visual approaches that aim at defragmenting a body of research using text-based, automatic literature analysis methods.

4. GlassViz: Visualizing Automatically-Extracted Entry Points for Exploring Scientific Corpora in Problem-Driven Visualization Research Benito-Santos, A., and Therón, R. In 2020 IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS) 2020 [Abs]

   In this paper, we report the development of a model and a proof-of-concept visual text analytics (VTA) tool to enhance document discovery in a problem-driven visualization research (PDVR) context. The proposed model captures the cognitive model followed by domain and visualization experts by analyzing the interdisciplinary communication channel as represented by keywords found in two disjoint collections of research papers. High distributional intercollection similarities are employed to build informative keyword associations that serve as entry points to drive the exploration of a large document corpus. Our approach is demonstrated in the context of research on visualization for the digital humanities.

5. An Interactive Visualization of the Historical Dictionary of Bavarian Dialects in Austria Benito-Santos, A., Losada Gómez, Antonio G., Theron Sánchez, Roberto, Wandl-Vogt, Eveline, and Dorn, Amelie 2020
6. Pilaster: A Collection of Citation Metadata Extracted From Publications on Visualization for the Digital Humanities Benito-Santos, A., and Therón, R. In 2020 IEEE 5th Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities (VIS4DH) 2020 [Abs]

   In this paper, we present Pilaster (https://visusal.github.io/pilaster/), a collection of citation metadata extracted from publications in visualization for the digital humanities. The collection is generated from a seed set of relevant publications from which we extracted cited works, including journal and conference papers, books, theses, or blog posts, among other resources. The main aim of this work revolves around three main points: first, the collection may serve as an entry point to the discipline for digital humanists and visualization scholars without previous experience in the field. Second, Pilaster can be regarded as a meeting point for more established visualization or humanities scholars seeking to collaborate in the development of novel research ideas and related visualization design studies in the context of the humanities. Third, and given the large amount of visualization design spaces that were captured, we believe the dataset has the potential to become the starting point for future studies aimed at understanding the particularities of problem-driven visualization research in this and other contexts.

2019

1. A Project Review under the Focus of Complexities on the Example of ExploreAT! Dorn, Amelie, Wandl-Vogt, Eveline, Palfinger, Thomas, Theron, Roberto, Way, Andy, Abgaz, Yalemisew, Benito, Alejandro, and Losada, Antonio In Digital Humanities 2019 Conference Papers 2019
2. Evaluación de Una Metodología Novel Basada En Cuadernos Interactivos Para El Aprendizaje de La Programación En Python Benito, Alejandro, Santamaría, Rodrigo, and Therón, Roberto Actas de las Jornadas sobre Enseñanza Universitaria de la Informática 2019 [Abs]

   La enseñanza de la programación a alumnos de nivel preuniversitario sin experiencia en pensamiento computacional supone un reto que necesita de métodos didácticos noveles especialmente concebidos para un público que en los últimos años ha modificado radicalmente la forma en la que recibe información. Esta contribución describe la experiencia de adaptar y evaluar, en el contexto de una clase de alumnos de primer curso del Grado en Estadística (N=43), una metodología y un ecosistema de herramientas interactivas orientadas al aprendizaje de la programación y la ciencia de datos. Bajo este enfoque, la metodología experimental concebida implementa técnicas como la programación por pares y TDD (Test-Driven Development), lo cual, como se pudo comprobar a través de las evaluaciones realizadas, tuvo un efecto positivo en el aprovechamiento del tiempo dedicado a la asignatura y en la satisfacción general percibida por el alumnado sobre la impartición de los contenidos de la guía docente. En línea con otras investigaciones actuales, los materiales didácticos fueron puestos a disposición de la comunidad docente de manera abierta y gratuita, lo cual se espera contribuya a mejorar la metodología en futuras experiencias.

   
   

   
   

   Abstract

   
   

   
   

   Teaching programming to undergrad students without previous experience in computational thinking poses a challenge that calls for novel didactic methods oriented explicitly towards this kind of audience. In our contribution, we describe the experience of adapting and evaluating a novel methodology and its associated ecosystem of tools in a classroom of 43 first-year students (N=43) of statistics. Following recommendations found in the literature, the experimental methodology implements pair-programming and TDD (Test-

   Driven Development) techniques intending to improve both the teaching and learning experiences. From the evaluation, we could learn that this had a positive impact on the students’ performance and their general satisfaction with the course. Finally, the educational materials of this research were collected and put online under a Creative Commons license so that other scientific peers can replicate our work in other future didactic experiences.

   
   

3. La Visualización de Datos en la Lectura Digital Moderna: Pasado, Presente y Futuro Benito Santos, Alejandro, and Theron Sánchez, Roberto 2019 [Abs]

   José Antonio Cordón (ed.) Vol. 2

4. Exposing Uncertainty on the Historical Name Normalization Task Benito-Santos, Alejandro, Díaz, Alejandro Rodríguez, and Sánchez, Roberto Therón In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality 2019 [Abs]

   As current research shows, the humanities and visualization communities are greatly benefitting from each other thanks to the interdisciplinary idiosyncrasy of a research field, the Digital Humanities (DH) that has gained significant attention in recent years from a vast number of scholars with disparate backgrounds. The DH suppose a vibrant field of experimentation for the application of innovative visualization design techniques and other related computational methods. A new wave in visualization research, uncertainty visualization, focuses on the display and conveyance of the uncertainty present in a great variety of statistical and algorithmic methods driving computations in a wide range of scientific domains. In this paper, we present a visualization dashboard concept in which we introduced uncertainty induced by a simple linguistic algorithm that is commonly employed in humanities research. According to this new paradigm, we showcase how accessible pre-existing visualizations, such as 2D histograms, can be easily adapted to communicate inherent algorithmic variability to the user, motivating uncertainty-aware research analyses in a DH context.

5. Data-Driven Visual Performance Analysis in Soccer: An Exploratory Prototype Peñas, Carlos Lago, Benito Santos, Alejandro, Theron, Roberto, Losada, Antonio, Villarino, Marián Fernández, and Sampaio, Jaime E. Motricidade; Ribeira de Pena 2019 [Abs]

   In soccer, understanding of collective tactical behavior has become an integral part in sports analysis at elite levels. Evolution of technology allows collection of increasingly larger and more specific data sets related to sport activities in cost-effective and accessible manner. All this information is minutely scrutinized by thousands of analysis around the globe in search for answers that can, in the long-term, help increase the performance of individuals or teams in their respective competitions. It is proven that visualization and computer-vision techniques, correctly applied to the context of a problem, help data analysis focus on the relevant information at each stage of the process, and generally lead to a better understanding of the facts that lie behind the data. In this study, Peñas et al demonstrate that including visual analysis techniques in sports group behavior analysis can produce both high quality results and a satisfactory experience with the computer at the same time.

6. Intuitive Ontology-Based SPARQL Queries for RDF Data Exploration Rodríguez Díaz, Alejandro, Benito-Santos, Alejandro, Dorn, Amelie, Abgaz, Yalemisew, Wandl-Vogt, Eveline, and Therón, Roberto IEEE Access 2019 [Abs]

   This paper introduces a strategy for both the retrieval and analysis of linked open data (LOD) based on the use of visual tools. Retrieving and understanding data from triplestores (such as SPARQL) requires technical knowledge and proves to be challenging with large datasets, which result in an increase in the mental overload when unknown ontologies are involved in the creation of complex queries. These two problems benefit greatly from visual techniques that allow for executing them in an easier and more intuitive manner. These techniques have already been applied to each problem separately; however, we propose combining them to lower the complexity of triple-store data retrieval and empower its exploration and analysis through specific data visualizations. To demonstrate the suitability of this strategy, a web-based tool was implemented. It allows for the creation of interactive queries using node-link ontology representations, and a subsequent filtering and analysis through a configurable dashboard with different data visualizations. This paper also presents a user-centred design process and evaluation of the proposed tool.

7. Towards an Uncertainty-Aware Visualization in the Digital Humanities Therón Sánchez, Roberto, Benito-Santos, Alejandro, Santamaría Vicente, Rodrigo Santamaría, and Losada Gómez, Antonio Informatics 2019 [Abs]

   As visualization becomes widespread in a broad range of cross-disciplinary academic domains, such as the digital humanities (DH), critical voices have been raised on the perils of neglecting the uncertain character of data in the visualization design process. Visualizations that, purposely or not, obscure or remove uncertainty in its different forms from the scholars’ vision may negatively affect the manner in which humanities scholars regard computational methods as useful tools in their daily work. In this paper, we address the issue of uncertainty representation in the context of the humanities from a theoretical perspective, in an attempt to provide the foundations of a framework that allows for the construction of ecological interface designs which are able to expose the computational power of the algorithms at play while, at the same time, respecting the particularities and needs of humanistic research. To this end, we review past uncertainty taxonomies in other domains typically related to the humanities and visualization, such as cartography and GIScience. From this review, we select an uncertainty taxonomy related to the humanities that we link to recent research in visualization for the DH. Finally, we bring a novel analytics method developed by other authors (Progressive Visual Analytics) into question, which we argue can be a good candidate to resolve the aforementioned difficulties in DH practice.

8. Cross-Domain Visual Exploration of Academic Corpora via the Latent Meaning of User-Authored Keywords Benito-Santos, A., and Therón Sánchez, R. IEEE Access 2019

2018

1. Creating Meaningful Narratives in Collections of Historical Lexical Data Benito Santos, Alejandro, Losada, Antonio G, Therón, Roberto, Dorn, Amelie, and Wandl-Vogt, Eveline GI_Forum 2018 2018
2. Shedding Light on Indigenous Knowledge Concepts and World Perception through Visual Analysis Benito, Alejandro, Dorn, Amelie, Therón, Roberto, Wandl-Vogt, Eveline, and Losada, Antonio In Digital Humanities 2018 Book of Abstracts 2018
3. Data-Driven Visual Performance Analysis in Soccer: An Exploratory Prototype Benito-Santos, Alejandro, Theron, Roberto, Losada, Antonio, Sampaio, Jaime E., and Lago-Peñas, Carlos Frontiers in Psychology 2018 [Abs]

   In soccer, understanding of collective tactical behaviour has become an integral part in sports analysis at elite levels. Evolution of technology allows collection of in-creasingly larger and more specific data sets related to sport activities in cost-effective and accessible manner. All this information is minutely scrutinized by thousands of analysts around the globe in search of an-swers that can in the long term help increase the performance of indi-viduals or teams in their respective competitions. As the volume of data increases in size, so does the complexity of the problem and the need for suitable tools that leverage the cognitive load involved in the inves-tigation. It is proven that visualization and computer-vision techniques, correctly applied to the context of a problem, help data analysts focus on the relevant information at each stage of the process, and generally lead to a better understanding of the facts that lie behind the data. In the current study, we presented a software prototype capable of assisting researchers and performance analysts in their duty of studying group collective behavior in soccer games and trainings. We used geospatial data acquired from a professional match to demonstrate its capabilities in two different case studies. Furthermore, we successfully proved the efficiency of the different visualization techniques implemented in the prototype and demonstrated how visual analysis can effectively improve some of the basic tasks employed by sports experts on their daily work, complementing more traditional approaches.

4. Unlocking Cultural Conceptualisation in Indigenous Language Resources: Collaborative Computing Methodologies Dorn, Amelie, Wandl-Vogt, Eveline, Abgaz, Yalemisew, Benito Santos, Alejandro, and Therón, Roberto In Proceedings of the LREC 2018 Workshop CCURL 2018 2018 [Abs]

   The world’s indigenous languages and related cultural knowledge are under considerable threat of diminishing given the increasing expansion of the use of standard languages, particularly through the wide-ranging pervasion of digital media and machine readable editions of electronic resources. There is thus a pressing need to preserve and breathe life into traditional data resources containing both valuable linguistic and cultural knowledge. In this paper we demonstrate on the example of an Austrian non-standard language resource (DBÖ/dbo@ema), how the combined application of semantic modelling of cultural concepts and visual exploration tools are key in unlocking the indigenous knowledge system, traditional world views and valuable cultural content contained within this rich resource. The original data collection questionnaires serve as a pilot case study and initial access point to the entire collection. Set within a Digital Humanities context, the collaborative methodological approach described here acts as a demonstrator for opening up traditional/nonstandard language resources for cultural content exploration through computing, ultimately giving access to, re-circulating and preserving otherwise lost immaterial cultural heritage.

5. Toward Supporting Decision-Making Under Uncertainty in Digital Humanities with Progressive Visualization Therón, Roberto, Benito, Alejandro, Santamaría, Rodrigo, and Losada, Antonio G. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality 2018 [Abs]

   Digital Humanities (DH) research and practice is subject to uncertainty during the life cycle of any project. Even in non data-oriented cases, analysts and other stakeholders need to make decisions without being aware of the level of uncertainty associated to the data being transformed by the computational tools used to enable the kind of novel work of humanists pursued within DH. We examine in this paper the literature that have characterized the types and sources of uncertainty in other fields, with the intent of establishing a foundation upon which build novel computational tools supporting the decision-making under uncertainty processes that DH is currently facing. We propose the use of progressive visual analytics as a feasible means to manage decision-making under uncertainty, which may help tackling some challenges related to the elimination or mitigation of uncertainty in DH, that otherwise would tamper the quality of the yielded results.

2017

1. Avances en Informática y Automática. Décimo Workshop Arista Flores, Maria Pilar, Benito Santos, Alejandro, Blanco Rodríguez, Francisco Javier, Brito de Aquino, Pamella Arielle, Corado Juárez, Gerardo Andrés, Corchado Rodríguez, Juan Manuel, Curto Diego, María Belén, Encinas Elvira, Alberto, Flores González, Eduardo, González Arrieta, Angélica, López Batista, Vivian, López Sánchez, Daniel, Milla de Castro, Diego, Moreno Rodilla, Vidal, Navarro Cáceres, María, Pérez Lancho, Belén, Revuelta Herrero, Jorge, Therón-Sánchez, Roberto, Vicente Juan, Pablo, and Zazo Rodríguez, Ángel Francisco 2017 [Abs]

   [ES]El Máster Oficial en Sistemas Inteligentes de la Universidad de Salamanca tiene como principal objetivo promover la iniciación de los estudiantes en el ámbito de la investigación. El congreso organizado por el Departamento de Informática y Automática que se celebra dentro del Máster en Sistemas Inteligentes de la Universidad de Salamanca proporciona la oportunidad ideal para que sus estudiantes presenten los principales resultados de sus Trabajos de Fin de Máster y obtengan una realimentación del interés de los mismos. La décima edición del workshop “Avances en Informática y Automática”, correspondiente al curso 2015 - 2016, ha sido un encuentro interdisciplinar donde se han presentado trabajos pertenecientes a un amplio abanico de líneas de investigación, desde los sistemas biométricos y la visualización de la información hasta la minería de datos pasando por otros campos relacionados. Todos los trabajos han sido supervisados por investigadores de reconocido prestigio pertenecientes a la Universidad de Salamanca, proporcionando el marco idóneo para sentar las bases de una futura tesis doctoral. Entre los principales objetivos del congreso se encuentran: Ofrecer a los estudiantes un marco donde exponer sus primeros trabajos de investigación. Proporcionar a los participantes un foro donde discutir ideas y encontrar nuevas sugerencias de compañeros, investigadores y otros asistentes a la reunión. Permitir a cada estudiante una realimentación de los participantes sobre su trabajo y una orientación sobre las futuras direcciones de investigación. Contribuir al desarrollo del espíritu de colaboración en la investigación.

2. Exploring Lemma Interconnections in Historical Dictionaries Benito, Alejandro, Therón, Roberto, Losada, Antonio, Wandl-Vogt, Eveline, and Dorn, Amelie In Proc. 2nd Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities (VIS4DH) 2017 [Abs]

   In this paper we discuss the goals, motivations and other particularities of a visual exploratory analysis tool for historical dictionaries of the Bavarian dialects in Austria. As an input data set we employ the digitized version of the Historical Dictionary of Bavarian Dialects in Austria (Wörterbuch der bairischen Mundarten in Österreich or WBO), an initiative started in 1963 which compiles more than five million paper slips collected during the years 1911-1998 in different areas of current Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary and northern Italy. In the 1990s these paper slips started to be progressively digitized, becoming part of the Database of Bavarian Dialects (DBO) and in 2010 nearly 32.000 records related to plant names were made available online on the DBO electronically-mapped (dbo@ema) platform. In more recent efforts, the project exploreAT!: Exploring Austria’s Culture Through the Language Glass, which this work is part of, started in 2015. Its aim is “to reveal unique insights into the rich texture of the German Language, especially in Austria, by providing state of the art tools for exploring the unique collection (1911-1998) of the Bavarian Dialects in the region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire”, and it has originated other publications in conference proceedings that we encourage the reader to review [8, 19].

3. Co-Designing Innovation Networks for Cross-Sectoral Collaboration on the Example of exploreAT! Gura, Caitlin, Dorn, Amelie, Benito, Alejandro, Wandl-Vogt, Eveline, and Losada, Antonio G. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality 2017
4. A Web-Oriented Reactive Visualization Architecture for Data-Driven Research in Digital Humanities Benito Santos, Alejandro, Losada Gómez, Antonio Gabriel, Therón Sánchez, Roberto, Dorn, Amelie, and Wandl-Vogt, Evelin In Libro de Resúmenes. III Congreso de La Sociedad Internacional Humanidades Digitales Hispánicas. Sociedades, Políticas, Saberes. 2017

2016

1. Visualización de Datos En Humanidades Digitales Benito Santos, Alejandro, and Therón Sánchez, Roberto 2016 [Abs]

   El estudio de diccionarios históricos ha sido una tarea tradicionalmente compleja por la gran cantidad de fuentes y datos de diferente naturaleza que están implicados en el proceso. El análisis visual exploratorio puede ser de gran ayuda para las investigadoras en la materia a la hora de crear mapas mentales que re ejen acertadamente la situación de los datos, mejorando y acelerando la extracción de conocimiento de valor y la llegada a conclusiones signifcativas. En este artículo se proponen un método de trabajo y un prototipo para la exploración visual interactiva de corpus no estándar relacionado con los dialectos del bávaro en Austria. A partir de la importación de conjuntos masivos de datos provenientes de la digitalización de fuentes originales, logramos ofrecer a la investigadora en lexicografía una herramienta que logra dotar de un enfoque nuevo a los datos con respecto a otras soluciones existentes relacionadas y que sirve de marco de referencia para futuras colaboraciones en la materia entre equipos especializados en Ciencias de la Computación y Lingüística.

2. A Spatio-Temporal Visual Analysis Tool for Historical Dictionaries Benito, Alejandro, Losada, Antonio G., Therón, Roberto, Dorn, Amelie, Seltmann, Melanie, and Wandl-Vogt, Eveline In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality 2016
3. Bkviz: A Basketball Visual Analysis Tool Losada, Antonio G, Therón, Roberto, and Benito, Alejandro IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 2016