Collaboratively Analyzing Large Data Sets using Multitouch Surfaces

Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). CSCW’12, February 11–15, 2012, Seattle, Washington, USA. ACM 978-1-4503-0556-3/12/02. Abstract The analysis of large data sets is increasingly collaborative, multidisciplinary and even distributed. There are many advantages including numerous checks and balances on the results. But, even in highly distributed analytic tasks, it would be useful to concurrently support co-located analyses by groups or teams. Large multi-touch surfaces present opportunities for presenting large amounts of data. They also naturally support the co-analysis of this data by co-located, multi-disciplinary teams of analysts or groups of people. We present a field study of multi-disciplinary collaboration that exposes some physical and behavioral aspects of multi-disciplinary collaboration. Then we describe our current work on supporting the co-analysis of large data sets in data centres where we are addressing psychological issues pertaining to user interface design.