A way of thinking,
not just of showing.

In design disciplines, and particularly in human–computer interaction and information visualization, researchers often need to study material that is visual in nature: screenshots, sketches, photographs, videos, or images of physical objects and spaces. Despite a rich literature on analyzing visual artifacts in the social sciences and the arts, few resources reflect on the value and the means of doing so within information visualization or interface design, even though visual design is so often the primary channel for communicating data.

This archive takes up that gap. It collects concrete, reusable methods for working with visual data and documents each one as a step-by-step practice grounded in a real, published study, so a method is not just described in the abstract but shown with the figures, materials, and moves of the research it came from.

Every method is filed under one or more of three purposes:

• Gathering: eliciting and collecting visual data
• Understanding: analyzing and interpreting it
• Communicating: presenting it to others

The project grew out of a paper that introduced the benefits of visual methods through a set of case studies and issued a call to crowd-source more of them. This archive is that call, made permanent: a place where the analytic moves that usually stay undocumented can be written down, shared, and built on.

Wang, Z., Carpendale, S., & Huron, S. Towards Visual Methods: Reflections on how visuals enrich empirical research.