Seamless Collaborative Coding with Visualization

Abstract. Coding data is a time-consuming activity, but one that is found in many places like scientific research and public online spaces. We developed the CollaCode system to support collaborative coding for a video game dataset, leveraging visualization with ubiquitous editing for seamless transitions between editing data and analyzing coding results. CollaCode employs multiple visualizations to support different activities in the coding workflow: tagging data, analyzing coding results, and resolving disagreements. Compared to existing approaches, our system explicitly models coding iterations, allowing coders to understand tag provenance while giving more transparency to the coding process. We discuss challenges in collaborative coding settings, how our system design addresses these challenges, and opportunities we see for future work.