Data work with simple sensor data and annotations is demanding - even for experts. This includes handling, browsing, selecting and curating this data in form of time-series visualizations in graphs and making sense of additional material such as user annotations and metadata. Existing solutions do not address the needs of interdisciplinary data work in this domain - often in multistepped workflows of individual and collaborative data work. To research how we can support these data work activities, we adapted a data annotation tool on top of Grafana to represent functional needs and workflows. Our findings show that involved researchers appreciated the simplification of an otherwise complex, tedious and error-prone workflow involving different analog and digital tools. The proposed system fosters individual as well as asynchronous and synchronous collaborative data work of involved researchers. We discuss how different elements enabled the successful collaboration and derive implications for design for future data work tools.
Kurze et al. (Thu,) studied this question.