Hugo Romat, Nathalie Henry Riche, Ken Hinckley, Bongshin Lee,
Caroline Appert, Emmanuel Pietriga, Christopher Collins
During sensemaking, people annotate insights: underlining sentences in a document or circling regions on a map. They jot down their hypotheses: drawing correlation lines on scatterplots or creating personal legends to track patterns. We present ActiveInk, a system enabling people to seamlessly transition between exploring data and externalizing their thoughts using pen and touch.
ActiveInk enables the natural use of pen for active reading behaviors, while supporting analytic actions by activating any of these ink strokes. Through a qualitative study with eight participants, we contribute observations of active reading behaviors during data exploration and design principles to support sensemaking.
System features

Highlight

Paint

Cut

Copy

Hide

Remove

Clear

Label

Compute Statistics

Recognize Ink Content

Change and Edit Underlying Data

Ink Lens
Study

P1- Inking

P1- Prefix

P1- Postfix

P2- Inking

P2- Prefix

P2- Postfix

P3- Inking

P3- Prefix

P3- Postfix

P4- Inking

P4- Prefix

P4- Postfix

P5- Inking

P5- Prefix

P5- Postfix

P6- Inking

P6- Prefix

P6- Postfix

P7- Inking

P7- Prefix

P7- Postfix

P8- Inking

P8- Prefix

P8- Prefix

P8- Postfix

P8- Postfix
Study Results

Subjective experience responses by participants across conditions.

Ink colors used by participants across conditions. Each block reflects a 15 minute analysis task.