Dynamic Color Mapping with a Multi-Scale Histogram: A Design Study with Physical Scientists

Many research and development activities for scientific data analysis have focused on scalability challenges and data-driven features. Conversely, data visualization that focuses on models requiring human interaction rarely involve practical and largescale scientific data analysis. Therefore, a gap exists between interactive data visualization and scientific data analysis applications. In this paper, we present a design study of interactive data visualization to support scientists who visually analyze data from neutron scattering experiments. This study was conducted in multiple phases: 1) problem characterization; 2) initial design and formative evaluation; and 3) iterative design. We characterize the problems and the design requirements for the analysis of the specific physical science data. We discuss the design, development, evaluation of our visual analytics tool and as well as our iterative developments with physical scientists. We show how to bridge the gap between the two disciplines uncovering new potential to solve their challenges in this design study. We focus on a specific challenge, finding an optimal color mapping, which plays a critical role in neutron scattering science and is broadly applicable to other scientific domains. To address the challenge, we propose two interactive visualization techniques: a dynamic color scale bar (DCSB) and a multi-scale histogram (MSH).