ProvenanceWidgets: A Library of UI Control Elements to Track and Dynamically Overlay Analytic Provenance
IEEE TVCG · 2025
Abstract
We present ProvenanceWidgets, a Javascript library of UI control elements such as radio buttons, checkboxes, and dropdowns to track and dynamically overlay a user’s analytic provenance. These in situ overlays not only save screen space but also minimize the amount of time and effort needed to access the same information from elsewhere in the UI. In this paper, we discuss how we design modular UI control elements to track how often and how recently a user interacts with them and design visual overlays showing an aggregated summary as well as a detailed temporal history. We demonstrate the capability of ProvenanceWidgets by recreating three prior widget libraries: (1) Scented Widgets, (2) Phosphor objects, and (3) Dynamic Query Widgets. We also evaluated its expressiveness and conducted case studies with visualization developers to evaluate its effectiveness. We find that ProvenanceWidgets enables developers to implement custom provenance-tracking applications effectively. ProvenanceWidgets is available as open-source software at https://provenancewidgets.github.io to help application developers build custom provenance-based systems.
Citation
@article{narechania2025provenancewidgets,
author = {Narechania, Arpit and Odak, Kaustubh and El-Assady, Mennatallah and Endert, Alex},
journal = {IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics},
title = {{ProvenanceWidgets: A Library of UI Control Elements to Track and Dynamically Overlay Analytic Provenance}},
year = {2025},
volume = {31},
number = {1},
pages = {1235-1245},
doi = {10.1109/TVCG.2024.3456144},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2024.3456144}
}