Multiple Workspaces in Visual Analytics

Exploratory visual analysis is an iterative process, where analysts often start from an overview of the data. Subsequently, they often pursue different hypotheses through multiple rounds of interaction and analysis. Commercial visualization packages support mostly a model with a single analysis path, where the system view represents only the final state of the users' current analysis. In this paper, we investigate the benefit of using multiple workspaces to support alternative analyses, enabling users to create different workspaces to pursue multiple analysis paths at the same time. We implemented a prototype for multiple workspaces using a multi-tab design in a visual analytics system. The results of our user studies show that multiple workspaces: enable analysts to work on concurrent tasks, work well for organizing an analysis, and make it easy to revisit previous parts of their work.