CrossData: Leveraging Text-Data Connections for Authoring Data Documents

Data documents play a central role in recording, presenting, and disseminating data. Despite the proliferation of applications and systems designed to support the analysis, visualization, and communication of data, writing data documents remains a laborious process, requiring a constant back-and-forth between data processing and writing tools. Interviews with eight professionals revealed that their workflows contained numerous tedious, repetitive, and error-prone operations. The key issue that we identified is the lack of persistent connection between text and data. Thus, we developed CrossData, a prototype that treats text-data connections as persistent, interactive, first-class objects. By automatically identifying, establishing, and leveraging text-data connections, CrossData enables rich interactions to assist in the authoring of data documents. An expert evaluation with eight users demonstrated the usefulness of CrossData, showing that it not only reduced the manual effort in writing data documents but also opened new possibilities to bridge the gap between data exploration and writing.