Towards Reusable and Reactive Widgets for Information Visualization Research and Dissemination

The information visualization research community commonly produces supporting software to demonstrate technical contributions to the field. However, developing this software tends to be an overwhelming task. The final product tends to be a research prototype without much thought for modularization and re-usability, which makes it harder to replicate and adopt. This paper presents a design pattern for facilitating the creation, dissemination, and re-utilization of visualization techniques using reactive widgets. The design pattern features basic concepts that leverage modern front-end development best practices and standards, which facilitate development and replication. The paper presents several usage examples of the pattern, templates for implementation, and even a wrapper for facilitating the conversion of any Vega [27], [28] specification into a reactive widget. https://johnguerra.co/reactiveWidgets