Leilani Battle, Peitong Duan, Zachery Miranda, Dana Mukusheva, Remco Chang, Michael Stonebraker &ndash; University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA; Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA
Beagle: Automated Extraction and Interpretation of Visualizations from the Web
``How common is interactive visualization on the web?'' ``What is the most popular visualization design?'' ``How prevalent are pie charts really?'' These questions intimate the role of interactive visualization in the real (online) world. In this paper, we present our approach (and findings) to answering these questions. First, we introduce Beagle, which mines the web for SVG-based visualizations and automatically classifies them by type (i.e., bar, pie, etc.). With Beagle, we extract over 41,000 visualizations across five different tools and repositories, and classify them with 85\% accuracy, across 24 visualization types. Given this visualization collection, we study usage across tools. We find that most visualizations fall under four types: bar charts, line charts, scatter charts, and geographic maps. Though controversial, pie charts are relatively rare for the visualization tools that were studied. Our findings also suggest that the total visualization types supported by a given tool could factor into its ease of use. However this effect appears to be mitigated by providing a variety of diverse expert visualization examples to users.
University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA; Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA
web-science, web-crawling
As found with other web crawling projects, such as the Common Crawl¹, our web crawls represent a specific point in time for the websites [...]