City on the river: visualizing temporal collaboration

Collaboration is an important component of most work activities. We are interested in understanding how configurations of people come together to create outputs over time. We propose an interactive visualization tool (City on the River) for visualizing collaborations over time. The City on the River (CotR) visualization shows the contributions and artifacts ("products") of a team on a timeline and the individuals on the team who contributed to each product. CotR enables interactive analyses of each of these components for answering questions such as, which people work together on the most products, which products involve the most people, what kinds of products were produced when and by whom, etc. CotR can be used for analyzing diverse domains such as research collaborations, conference participation, email conversations, and software development. In this paper, we present the results of an experiment to assess CotR for analyzing collaboration and outcomes in GitHub projects. We compared the quality of answers, time to answer, and approaches taken to analyze the project collaborations by two groups of people: one group used the GitHub data displayed in a spreadsheet; the other group used the GitHub data displayed using CotR.