🤖 Datamations

Plots and tables are commonplace in today’s data-driven world, and much research has been done on how to make these figures easy to read and understand. Often times, however, the informa- tion they contain conveys only the end result of a complex and subtle data analysis pipeline. This can leave the reader struggling to understand what steps were taken to arrive at a figure, and what implications this has for the underlying results. In this paper, we introduce datamations, which are animations designed to explain the steps that led to a given plot or table. We present the motivation and concept behind datamations, discuss how to programmatically generate them, and provide the results of two large-scale random- ized experiments investigating how datamations affect people’s abilities to understand potentially puzzling results compared to seeing only final plots and tables containing those results.