Authors often add text annotations to charts to provide additional context for visually prominent features such as peaks, valleys, and trends. However, writing annotations that provide contextual information, such as descriptions of temporal events, often requires considerable manual effort. To address this problem, we introduce Almanac, a JavaScript API that recommends annotations sourced from the New York Times Archive of news headlines. Almanac consists of two independent parts: (1) a prominence feature detector and (2) a contextual annotation recommender. We demonstrate the utility of the API using D3.js and Vega-Lite to annotate a variety of time-series charts covering many different data domains. Preliminary user feedback shows that Almanac is useful to support the authoring of charts with more descriptive annotations.

翻译：作者经常在图表中添加文本标注，为峰值、谷值和趋势等视觉显著特征提供额外背景信息。然而，编写能够提供上下文信息（如时间事件描述）的标注往往需要大量人工操作。为解决这一问题，我们提出Almanac——一款JavaScript API，能够从《纽约时报》新闻头条档案中推荐标注内容。Almanac由两个独立模块组成：（1）显著性特征检测器与（2）上下文标注推荐器。我们通过D3.js和Vega-Lite在覆盖多种数据领域的各类时间序列图表上验证了该API的实用性。初步用户反馈表明，Almanac能有效支持生成更具描述性标注的图表创作。