Supporting exploratory browsing with visualization of social interaction history

This thesis is concerned with the design, development, and evaluation of information visualization tools for supporting exploratory browsing. Information retrieval (IR) systems currently do not support browsing well. Responding to user queries, IR systems typically compute relevance scores of documents and then present the document surrogates to users in order of relevance. Other systems such as email clients and discussion forums simply arrange messages in reverse chronological order. Using these systems, people cannot gain an overview of a collection easily, nor do they receive adequate support for finding potentially useful items in the collection. This thesis explores the feasibility of using social interaction history to improve exploratory browsing. Social interaction history refers to traces of interaction among users in an information space, such as discussions that happen in the blogosphere or online newspapers through the commenting facility. The basic hypothesis of this work is that social interaction history can serve as a good indicator of the potential value of information items. Therefore, visualization of social interaction history would offer navigational cues for finding potentially valuable information items in a collection. To test this basic hypothesis, I conducted three studies. First, I ran statistical analysis of a social media data set. The results showed that there were positive relationships between traces of social interaction and the degree of interestingness of web articles. Second, I conducted a feasibility study to collect initial feedback about the potential of social interaction history to support information exploration. Comments from the participants were in line with the research hypothesis. Finally, I conducted a summative evaluation to measure how well visualization of social interaction history can improve exploratory browsing. The results showed that visualization of social interaction history was able to help users find interesting articles, to reduce wasted effort, and to increase user satisfaction with the visualization tool

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

Visualizing the Convergence of Metaliteracy and the Information Literacy Framework

Displaying information in a visual manner frequently enhances clarity. Highlighting thematic elements and their interrelationships can lead to understanding, even insights, that might not otherwise happen. While words describe, well-conceived graphics illuminate in both subtle and overt ways. Synergies between word and image are especially powerful. The visualization at the heart of this chapter makes connections between two separate but related frameworks: information literacy and metaliteracy. The ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education acknowledges that it was influenced by metaliteracy, and in particular metacognition.1 Metaliteracy emerged prior to the development of the ACRL Framework and was similarly designed to recast information literacy for a new era. While both provide comprehensive models, this chapter will explore the relationships between particular aspects of each: metaliterate learner characteristics and Framework dispositions. Metacognition will have a leading role in this analysis

Design Principals of Social Navigation

8th Delos Workshop on "User Interfaces for Digital Libraries" (on 21 October it will be held in conjuction with the 4th ERCIM Workshop on "User Interfaces for All"), SICS, Kista, Sweden, 21-23 October 1998PERSON

CollabGraph: A graph-based collaborative search summary visualisation

Currently, the search history in search engines is presented in a list view of some combination of enumerated results by title, URL, or search query. However, this classical list view is not ideal in collaborative search environments as it does not always assist users in understanding collaborators' search history results and the project's status. We present CollabGraph, a system for graph-based summary visualization in collaborative search learning environments. Our system differentiates from existing solutions by visualizing the summary of the collaboration results in a graph and having its core personal knowledge graphs (PKGs) for each user. Our research questions concentrate around the CollabGraph's usefulness, preference, and enhancement of participation of student's and teacher's feedback compared to the list view of search history results. We evaluate our approach with an online questionnaire in six different project-based searching as learning (SaL) scenarios (LSs). The evaluation of users' experience indicates that the CollabGraph is useful, highly likeable, and could benefit users' participation and teacher's feedback by providing more precise insights into the project status. Our approach helps users better perceive about everyone's work, and it is a highly preferable feature alongside the list view. In addition, the results demonstrate that graph summary visualizations, such as the CollabGraph, are more suitable for closed-end scenarios and collaborative projects with many participants

Social navigation

In this chapter we present one of the pioneer approaches in supporting users in navigating the complex information spaces, social navigation support. Social navigation support is inspired by natural tendencies of individuals to follow traces of each other in exploring the world, especially when dealing with uncertainties. In this chapter, we cover details on various approaches in implementing social navigation support in the information space as we also connect the concept to supporting theories. The first part of this chapter reviews related theories and introduces the design space of social navigation support through a series of example applications. The second part of the chapter discusses the common challenges in design and implementation of social navigation support, demonstrates how these challenges have been addressed, and reviews more recent direction of social navigation support. Furthermore, as social navigation support has been an inspirational approach to various other social information access approaches we discuss how social navigation support can be integrated with those approaches. We conclude with a review of evaluation methods for social navigation support and remarks about its current state

Quantifying, Modeling and Managing How People Interact with Visualizations on the Web

The growing number of interactive visualizations on the web has made it possible for the general public to access data and insights that were once only available to domain experts. At the same time, this rise has yielded new challenges for visualization creators, who must now understand and engage a growing and diverse audience. To bridge this gap between creators and audiences, we explore and evaluate components of a design-feedback loop that would enable visualization creators to better accommodate their audiences as they explore the visualizations. In this dissertation, we approach this goal by quantifying, modeling and creating tools that manage people’s open-ended explorations of visualizations on the web. In particular, we: 1. Quantify the effects of design alternatives on people’s interaction patterns in visualizations. We define and evaluate two techniques: HindSight (encoding a user’s interaction history) and text-based search, where controlled experiments suggest that design details can significantly modulate the interaction patterns we observe from participants using a given visualization. 2. Develop new metrics that characterize facets of people’s exploration processes. Specifically, we derive expressive metrics describing interaction patterns such as exploration uniqueness, and use Bayesian inference to model distributional effects on interaction behavior. Our results show that these metrics capture novel patterns in people’s interactions with visualizations. 3. Create tools that manage and analyze an audience’s interaction data for a given visualization. We develop a prototype tool, ReVisIt, that visualizes an audience’s interactions with a given visualization. Through an interview study with visualization creators, we found that ReVisIt make creators aware of individual and overall trends in their audiences’ interaction patterns. By establishing some of the core elements of a design-feedback loop for visualization creators, the results in this research may have a tangible impact on the future of publishing interactive visualizations on the web. Equipped with techniques, metrics, and tools that realize an initial feedback loop, creators are better able to understand the behavior and user needs, and thus create visualizations that make data and insights more accessible to the diverse audiences on the web

You can't always sketch what you want: Understanding Sensemaking in Visual Query Systems

Visual query systems (VQSs) empower users to interactively search for line charts with desired visual patterns, typically specified using intuitive sketch-based interfaces. Despite decades of past work on VQSs, these efforts have not translated to adoption in practice, possibly because VQSs are largely evaluated in unrealistic lab-based settings. To remedy this gap in adoption, we collaborated with experts from three diverse domains---astronomy, genetics, and material science---via a year-long user-centered design process to develop a VQS that supports their workflow and analytical needs, and evaluate how VQSs can be used in practice. Our study results reveal that ad-hoc sketch-only querying is not as commonly used as prior work suggests, since analysts are often unable to precisely express their patterns of interest. In addition, we characterize three essential sensemaking processes supported by our enhanced VQS. We discover that participants employ all three processes, but in different proportions, depending on the analytical needs in each domain. Our findings suggest that all three sensemaking processes must be integrated in order to make future VQSs useful for a wide range of analytical inquiries.Comment: Accepted for presentation at IEEE VAST 2019, to be held October 20-25 in Vancouver, Canada. Paper will also be published in a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) IEEE VIS (InfoVis/VAST/SciVis) 2019 ACM 2012 CCS - Human-centered computing, Visualization, Visualization design and evaluation method

Visualizing internetworked argumentation

In this chapter, we outline a project which traces its source of inspiration back to the grand visions of Vannevar Bush (scholarly trails of linked concepts), Doug Engelbart (highly interactive intellectual tools, particularly for argumentation), and Ted Nelson (large scale internet publishing with recognised intellectual property). In essence, we are tackling the age-old question of how to organise distributed, collective knowledge. Specifically, we pose the following question as a foil: In 2010, will scholarly knowledge still be published solely in prose, or can we imagine a complementary infrastructure that is ‘native’ to the emerging semantic, collaborative web, enabling more effective dissemination and analysis of ideas

The Code-Map Metaphor - A Review Of Its Use Within Software Visualisations

Software developers can use software visualisations employing the code-map metaphor to discover and correlate facts spread over a large code base. This work presents an extensive review of the use of the code-map metaphor for software visualisation. The review analyses a set of 29 publications, which together describe 21 software development tools that use visualisations employing the code-map metaphor. The review follows a task oriented framework to guide the analysis of the literature in terms of the task, audience, target, medium, representation, and evidence dimensions based on the code-map metaphor. Although the literature indicates that software visualisations based on the code-map metaphor are perceived by the research community to be helpful across all aspects of the software develop process, the main finding of our review is that there is a lack of quantitative evidence to support this perception. Thus, the effectiveness of visualisations incorporating the code-map metaphor is still unclear. The majority of the software visualisations analysed in this study, however , do provide qualitative observations regarding their usage in various scenarios. These are summarised and presented in this review as we believe the observations can be used as motivation for future empirical evaluations