DocuCompass: Effective exploration of document landscapes

Abstract

The creation of interactive visualization to analyze text documents has gained an impressive momentum in recent years. This is not surprising in the light of massive and still increasing amounts of available digitized texts. Websites, social media, news wire, and digital libraries are just few examples of the diverse text sources whose visual analysis and exploration offers new opportunities to effectively mine and manage the information and knowledge hidden within them. A popular visualization method for large text collections is to represent each document by a glyph in 2D space. These landscapes can be the result of optimizing pairwise distances in 2D to represent document similarities, or they are provided directly as meta data, such as geo-locations. For well-defined information needs, suitable interaction methods are available for these spatializations. However, free exploration and navigation on a level of abstraction between a labeled document spatialization and reading single documents is largely unsupported. As a result, vital foraging steps for task-tailored actions, such as selecting subgroups of documents for detailed inspection, or subsequent sense-making steps are hampered. To fill in this gap, we propose DocuCompass, a focus+context approach based on the lens metaphor. It comprises multiple methods to characterize local groups of documents, and to efficiently guide exploration based on users' requirements. DocuCompass thus allows for effective interactive exploration of document landscapes without disrupting the mental map of users by changing the layout itself. We discuss the suitability of multiple navigation and characterization methods for different spatializations and texts. Finally, we provide insights generated through user feedback and discuss the effectiveness of our approach.