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.

翻译：数据文档在记录、展示和传播数据中扮演着核心角色。尽管支持数据分析、可视化和数据传播的应用程序与系统日益普及，编写数据文档仍然是一个费力的过程，需要在数据处理与写作工具之间不断地来回切换。对八位专业人士的访谈揭示，他们的工作流程中包含大量繁琐、重复且易出错的操作。我们识别出的关键问题是文本与数据之间缺乏持久连接。因此，我们开发了CrossData原型，它将文本-数据连接视为持久的、可交互的一等实体。通过自动识别、建立并利用文本-数据连接，CrossData能够实现丰富的交互，以协助创作数据文档。一项由八位用户参与的专家评估展示了CrossData的实用性，表明它不仅减少了编写数据文档的手工劳动，还开辟了弥合数据探索与写作之间鸿沟的新可能性。