Visualizing Structured Text: A Prototype Graphical Tool for Analyzing Large Document Collections

In its early stages, the field of data visualization focused on representing data, which, though it had physical characteristics, was difficult if not impossible to see. From internal medicine to the ends of our reach into space, tools like magnetic resonance imagers and high-powered telescopes have collected, colored, and differentiated data for us. Those tools have changed the way we work with all kinds of data. But abstract ideas, by their nature, do not have physical attributes, so it is difficult to know where to begin to create representations of things like document structure. This project explores options for providing document visualizations to assist authors and information architects in analyzing their document collections. Though conduct of a user study falls outside the scope of this project, this paper also outlines a proposed method for evaluating the prototype