Veas Eduardo Enrique, Sabol Vedran, Singh Santokh, Ulbrich Eva Pauline
2015
Reading through Graphics: Interactive Landscapes to Explore Dynamic Topic Spaces
Proceedings Part I of the 17th HCI International Conference, HCI International 2015, Los Angeles, CA, USA, August 2-7, 2015
An information landscape is commonly used to represent relatedness in large, high-dimensional datasets, such as text document collections. In this paper we present interactive metaphors, inspired in map reading and visual transitions, that enhance the landscape representation for the analysis of topical changes in dynamic text repositories. The goal of interactive visualizations is to elicit insight, to allow users to visually formulate hypotheses about the underlying data and to prove them. We present a user study that investigates how users can elicit information about topics in a large document set. Our study concentrated on building and testing hypotheses using the map reading metaphors. The results show that people indeed relate topics in the document set from spatial relationships shown in the landscape, and capture the changes to topics aided by map reading metaphors.