Data scientists and other analytic professionals often use interactive visualization in the dissemination phase at the end of a workflow during which findings are communicated to a wider audience. Visualization scientists, however, hold that interactive representation of data can also be used during exploratory analysis itself. Since the use of interactive visualization is optional rather than mandatory, this leaves a "visualization gap" during initial exploratory analysis that is the onus of visualization researchers to fill. In this paper, we explore areas where visualization would be beneficial in applied research by conducting a design study using a novel variation on contextual inquiry conducted with professional data analysts. Based on these interviews and experiments, we propose a set of interactive initial exploratory visualization guidelines which we believe will promote adoption by this type of user.

Immersive analytics turns the very space surrounding the user into a canvas for data analysis, supporting human cognitive abilities in myriad ways. We present the results of a design study, contextual inquiry, and longitudinal evaluation involving professional economists using a Virtual Reality (VR) system for multidimensional visualization to explore actual economic data. Results from our preregistered evaluation highlight the varied use of space depending on context (exploration vs. presentation), the organization of space to support work, and the impact of immersion on navigation and orientation in the 3D analysis space.

Olfactory feedback for analytical tasks is a virtually unexplored area in spite of the advantages it offers for information recall, feature identification, and location detection. Here we introduce the concept of information olfactation as the fragrant sibling of information visualization, and discuss how scent can be used to convey data. Building on a review of the human olfactory system and mirroring common visualization practice, we propose olfactory marks, the substrate in which they exist, and their olfactory channels that are available to designers. To exemplify this idea, we present VISCENT: A six-scent stereo olfactory display capable of conveying olfactory glyphs of varying temperature and direction, as well as a corresponding software system that integrates the display with a traditional visualization display. Finally, we present three applications that make use of the viScent system: A 2D graph visualization, a 2D line and point chart, and an immersive analytics graph visualization in 3D virtual reality. We close the paper with a review of possible extensions of viScent and applications of information olfactation for general visualization beyond the examples in this paper.

Pandemic-driven economic changes are measurable in days and weeks rather than months and years, underscoring a need for more timely economic data to inform the public. We summarize newly available estimates of spending using card transaction data that are available on the Bureau of Economic Analysis website and analyze correlations between card data and official series. We find that card data perform well in measuring large changes in the economy around the pandemic, although the correlations are much lower during a period of stability prior to the pandemic. This pattern is likely attributable to a shift in the signal-to-noise ratio over these periods.