Understanding Visualization Idioms Through Deep Visualization

Abstract

Visualization (vis) idioms define the way visual representations are created and manipulated. Well-known vis idioms include familiar charts such as bar charts and pie charts. Vis research and applications require thorough understanding of vis idioms. As a medium to understand vis idioms, I suggest a novel approach that employs deep visualization. Deep visualization is a collective name of methods for visualizing the characteristics of neurons in deep neural networks by generating their preferred stimuli (images). In this paper, I present two neural networks, one classifying the type of vis idioms, and one generating images of given idiom type. By applying deep visualization on the neural classifier through the neural generator, I examine how deep visualization can help vis researchers understand diverse aspects of vis idioms in novel ways and potentially derive unexplored idioms.