Glyphs

Symmetric second-order tensor fields play a central role in scientific and biomedical studies as well as in image analysis and feature-extraction methods. The utility of displaying tensor field samples has driven the development of visualization techniques that encode the tensor shape and orientation into the geometry of a tensor glyph. With some exceptions, these methods work only for positive-definite tensors (i.e. having positive eigenvalues, such as diffusion tensors). We expand the scope of tensor glyphs to all symmetric second-order tensors in two and three dimensions, gracefully and unambiguously depicting any combination of positive and negative eigenvalues. We generalize a previous method of superquadric glyphs for positive-definite tensors by drawing upon a larger portion of the superquadric shape space, supplemented with a coloring that indicates the quadratic form (including eigenvalue sign). We show that encoding arbitrary eigenvalue magnitudes requires design choices that differ fundamentally from those in previous work on traceless tensors that arise in the study of liquid crystals. Our method starts with a design of 2-D tensor glyphs guided by principles of scale-preservation and symmetry, and creates 3-D glyphs that include the 2-D glyphs in their axis-aligned cross-sections. A key ingredient of our method is a novel way of mapping from the shape space of three-dimensional symmetric second-order tensors to the unit square. We apply our new glyphs to stress tensors from mechanics, geometry tensors and Hessians from image analysis, and rate-of-deformation tensors in computational fluid dynamics.

Glyph-based visualization can offer elegant and concise presentation of multivariate information while enhancing speed and ease in visual search experienced by users. As with icon designs, glyphs are usually created based on the designers' experience and intuition, often in a spontaneous manner. Such a process does not scale well with the requirements of applications where a large number of concepts are to be encoded using glyphs. To alleviate such limitations, we propose a new systematic process for glyph design by exploring the parallel between the hierarchy of concept categorization and the ordering of discriminative capacity of visual channels. We examine the feasibility of this approach in an application where there is a pressing need for an efficient and effective means to visualize workflows of biological experiments. By processing thousands of workflow records in a public archive of biological experiments, we demonstrate that a cost-effective glyph design can be obtained by following a process of formulating a taxonomy with the aid of computation, identifying visual channels hierarchically, and defining application-specific abstraction and metaphors.

In this paper, we present a user-centered design study on poetry visualization. We develop a rule-based solution to address the conflicting needs for maintaining the flexibility of visualizing a large set of poetic variables and for reducing the tedium and cognitive load in interacting with the visual mapping control panel. We adopt Munzner's nested design model to maintain high-level interactions with the end users in a closed loop. In addition, we examine three design options for alleviating the difficulty in visualizing poems latitudinally. We present several example uses of poetry visualization in scholarly research on poetry.

Data interpolation is one of the most important examples of this task. Franke compared sev-eral data interpolation techniques and evaluated the interpolants based on several characteristics such as accuracy, sensitivity to parameters and visual aspects Fra82]. Mann et al. also ...

Approaches to investigate biological processes have been of strong interest in the last years and are in the focus of several research areas, especially Systems Biology. Biochemical networks are crucial for such a comprehensive understanding of living beings. Drawings of these networks are often visually overloaded and do not scale. A common solution to deal with this complexity is to divide the complete network, e.g., the metabolism, into a large set of single pathways that are hierarchically structured. If those pathways are visualized, this strategy generates additional navigation and exploration problems as the user looses the context within the complete network. In this paper, we present a general solution of this problem of visualizing interconnected pathways and discuss it in context of biochemical networks. Our new visualization approach supports the analyst to get an overview to related pathways if he/she is working within a particular pathway of interest. By using glyphs, brushing, and topological information of the related pathways, our interactive visualization tool is able to intuitively guide the exploration and navigation process, and thus the analysis processes too. To deal with real data and current networks, our tool has been implemented as plugin for the VANTED system.

In the analysis of spatially-referenced timedependent data, gaining an understanding of the spatiotemporal distributions and relationships among the attributes in the data can be quite difficult. We present a visualization technique that addresses some of the challenges involved in visually exploring and analyzing the distributions of geo-spatial time-varying data. We have developed a pictorial representation that is based on the standard space-time cube metaphor and provides in a single display the overview and details of a large number of time-varying quantities. Our approach involves three-dimensional graphical widgets that intuitively represent profiles of the time-varying quantities and can be plotted on a geographic map to expose interesting spatiotemporal distributions of the data. We show how combining our visualization technique with standard data exploration features can assist in the exploration of salient patterns in a data set. The visualization approach described here supports expeditious exploration of multiple data sets; this in turn assists the process of building initial hypotheses about the attributes in a data set and enhances the user's ability to pose and explore interesting questions about the data.

We present a user study quantifying the effectiveness of Scaled Data-Driven Spheres (SDDS), a multivariate three-dimensional data set visualization technique. The user study compares SDDS, which uses separate sets of colored sphere glyphs to depict variable values, to superquadric glyphs, an alternative technique that maps all variable values to a single glyph. User study participants performed tasks designed to measure their ability to estimate values of particular variables and identify relationships among variables. Results from the study show that users were significantly more accurate and faster for both tasks under the SDDS condition.

: A) A 'traditional' sequence logo from [Bio13] showing: top -the consensus across 1809 protein sequences; middle -gram negative bacteria; and bottom -gram positive bacteria. B) Our sequence logo visualizing the same data as in A. This approach keeps in place the idea of the original sequence logo but removes the dominance of letters for space filling and adds glyphs to visualize overall properties of the dominating amino acids at a sequence location (e.g. charge and hydropathy).

Glyphs have been successfully used in poetry visualization for depicting the characteristics and positions of each phonetic articulation in relation to the human vocal system. While existing glyph designs provide visual representations for detailed observation and external memorization of the dynamics throughout a poem, they are less effective for observing the relationship and variance between different lines in a poem and in comparing different poems. In this short paper, we present three designs of macro-glyphs for summarizing the spatio-temporal dynamics at the level of poetic lines. In particular, we use statistics of a collection of poems to guide and optimize the designs. We report our comparative study on the effectiveness of these three designs.

In this paper, we present a new visualization approach to support Design For Manufacturing (DFM). This involves the correlation of manufacturing problems with the causative geometric characteristics. We then discuss the use of distance transform and 3-D thinning to extract these characteristics from a voxelized object. In contrast to current Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) tools, our system is very efficient and simple to use. It does not require the skill and experience to generate and control a numerical mesh and interpret the results. The specifically tailored visualization system makes the results selfevident. Though the current domain is die casting, it could potentially be applied to many net shape processes.

We describe a graphical system developed for researchers in materials science for extracting information from data obtained by atomic force microscopy. In particular, we consider the problem of computing surface orientations from data obtained from ceramic materials. The visualization problems we consider in designing this system include finding useful mechanisms for the researcher to interact with the data, presenting results in forms familiar to the scientist, and enhancing traditional display techniques.

Recently, Chinese event detection has attracted more and more attention. As a special kind of hieroglyphics, Chinese glyphs are semantically useful but still unexplored in this task. In this paper, we propose a novel Glyph-Aware Fusion Network, named GlyFN. It introduces the glyphs' information into the pre-trained language model representation. To obtain a better representation, we design a Vector Linear Fusion mechanism to fuse them. Specifically, it first utilizes a max-pooling to capture salient information. Then, we use the linear operation of vectors to retain unique information. Moreover, for large-scale unstructured text, we distribute the data into different clusters parallelly. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on ACE2005 and large-scale data. Experimental results show that GlyFN obtains increases of 7.48(10.18%) and 6.17(8.7%) in the F1-score for trigger identification and classification over the state-of-the-art methods, respectively. Furthermore, the event detection task for large-scale unstructured text can be efficiently accomplished through distribution.

"‘Asemic writing’ is defined by Tim Gaze as a collection of forms ‘which appears to be writing’, while ‘having no worded meaning’. Asemic forms may bear the hallmarks of writing, either through their shape or organization, but have no specific verbal signification. These signs are typically abstract, geometric glyphs, arranged in linear sequence so as to invite the act of reading, but that do not allow verbal interpretation. The relationship between literacy and asemic signs has been established historically, and many past examples of asemic writing (sometimes described as ‘pseudo-writing’) can be found in historical artefacts which convey a sense of status, power and exclusivity through asemic decoration.

Asemic language appears within images in Shaun Tan’s wordless picturebook, The Arrival (2006).  Tan uses this pseudo-writing to represent a generic foreign language, with the aim of showing a sense of alienation. These images demonstrate that language, when it is not understood, can be isolating. In other examples, asemic writing is used to convey a sense of otherness. Dylan Horricks (2014) uses shading within speech balloons to describe ‘words [that] were not understood by us’. Here, the use of a speech balloon signifies verbal communication, though no verbal meaning is present.

Numerous texts contain decipherable alien languages, painstakingly developed by linguists (such as Christine Schreyer’s Kryptonian). Such sign systems can be directly transliterated, offering the readers the challenge of deciphering messages. However, other comics, ranging from Peanuts to the X-Men, embrace asemisis. These present alien or animal languages that are never intended to contain decipherable messages, and instead convey a sense of otherness through the impossibility of understanding.

This paper will explore the motivations for featuring asemic signs in comics and graphic novels, focusing in particular on Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, and The X-Men, seeking to consider how meaning is achieved through meaninglessness in indecipherable symbols.
"