Data Visualization Practices and Shared Understanding in Interdisciplinary Workshops: Insights from Panel Analysis

Abstract

The integration of diverse disciplinary perspectives is essential for addressing complex contemporary challenges, yet achieving shared understanding among heterogeneous experts remains a significant barrier in interdisciplinary collaboration. This paper investigates the role of data visualization practices as cognitive scaffolds that facilitate meaning negotiation and epistemic alignment in interdisciplinary workshop settings. Utilizing a multi-wave panel analysis approach, this study tracks forty diverse project teams over a twenty-four-month period, capturing high-resolution data on their interactions with various data visualization tools during collaborative problem-solving sessions. By conceptualizing visualizations as boundary objects, this research operationalizes specific visual practices, such as interactive exploration, collaborative annotation, and visual complexity management, to measure their longitudinal impact on a validated index of shared understanding. The empirical findings indicate that active co-creation and interactive manipulation of visual artifacts significantly accelerate cognitive synchronization among team members from disparate academic and professional backgrounds. Furthermore, the panel data reveals a distinct temporal dynamic where initial exposure to highly complex visualizations temporarily increases cognitive friction, followed by a substantial enhancement in shared understanding as teams establish common visual vocabularies. These results provide robust quantitative evidence supporting the strategic implementation of interactive data visualization practices in interdisciplinary workshops, offering actionable insights for collaboration facilitators and systems designers.