Computational notebooks play a crucial role in modern research and data-driven disciplines by integrating code, data, and narrative text into a single, interactive environment. They enable reproducibility, transparency, and collaboration—core principles of open science—by allowing researchers to document their computational workflows alongside results and explanations. However, challenges such as version control, scalability, performance, and usability have emerged. Research into improving computational notebooks therefore focuses on enhancing their reliability, interactivity, and accessibility, as well as developing tools for provenance tracking, collaborative editing, and integration with larger software ecosystems. Advancements in these areas can significantly accelerate scientific discovery and make computational research more robust, shareable, and comprehensible.
Extending Notebooks to 2D
Representing branching and comparative analyses in computational notebooks is complicated by the 1-dimensional (1D), top-down list arrangement of cells. Given the ubiquity of these and other non-linear features, their importance to analysis and narrative, and the struggles current 1D computational notebooks have, enabling organization of computational notebook cells in 2 dimensions (2D) may prove valuable. We investigated whether and how users would organize cells in such a “2D Computational Notebook” through a user study and gathered feedback from participants through a follow-up survey and optional interviews. Through the user study, we found 3 main design patterns for arranging notebook cells in 2D: Linear, Multi-Column, and Workboard. Through the survey and interviews, we found that users see potential value in 2D Computational Notebooks for branching and comparative analyses, but the expansion from 1D to 2D may necessitate additional navigational and organizational aids.
Related publications:
- Jesse Harden, Elizabeth Christman, Nurit Kirshenbaum, John Wenskovitch, Jason Leigh, and Chris North. “Exploring Organization of Computational Notebook Cells in 2D Space,” in 2022 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC). 2022, pp. 1-6. DOI: 10.1109/VL/HCC53370.2022.9833128.
Albireo
Computational notebooks have become a major medium for data exploration and insight communication in data science. Although expressive, dynamic, and flexible, in practice they are loose collections of scripts, charts, and tables that rarely tell a story or clearly represent the analysis process. This leads to a number of usability issues, particularly in the comprehension and exploration of notebooks. In this work, we design, implement, and evaluate Albireo, a visualization approach to summarize the structure of notebooks, with the goal of supporting more effective exploration and communication by displaying the dependencies and relationships between the cells of a notebook using a dynamic graph structure. We evaluate the system via a case study and expert interviews, with our results indicating that such a visualization is useful for an analyst’s self-reflection during exploratory programming, and also effective for communication of narratives and collaboration between analysts.
Related publications:
- John Wenskovitch, Jian Zhao, Scott Carter, Matthew Cooper, and Chris North. “Albireo: An Interactive Tool for Visually Summarizing Computational Notebook Structure,” in 2019 Symposium on Visualization in Data Science. VDS’19. Vancouver, BC, Canada, Oct. 2019, pp. 1-10. DOI: 10.1109/VDS48975.2019.8973385.
CHI Computational Notebooks Workshop
The overall goal of this workshop was to bring together researchers from across the CHI community to share their knowledge and build collaborations at the intersection of computational notebook and HCI research, focusing on both the effective design and effective use of interfaces and interactions within computational notebook environments. This includes innovating upon the computational notebook metaphor, designing new tools, interfaces, and interactions for use with computational notebooks, and more. We aim to pull expertise from across all fields of CHI to deliver novel research and generate open discussion about the current state of computational notebooks, how it can be improved from an HCI standpoint, and how these potential improvements can direct future research. To achieve this goal, we propose a full-day, hybrid workshop with discussions of challenges and opportunities, paper and demo presentations, lightning talks, and a keynote. Participants in this workshop will exchange ideas and help define a roadmap for future research at the intersection of HCI and computational notebook design.
Related publications:
- Jesse Harden, April Yi Wang, Rebecca Faust, Katherine E. Isaacs, Nurit Kirshenbaum, John Wenskovitch, Jian Zhao, and Chris North. “Human-Notebook Interactions: The CHI of Computational Notebooks,” in Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI EA’24. Honolulu, HI, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2024. DOI: 10.1145/3613905.3636318.
