A Method for Thematic and Structural Visualization of Academic Content

Academic work: grading student assignments or conducting literature surveys entails extensive reading, which is both a time consuming and cognitively demanding task. The challenge increases proportionally with the increase of volume of the textual content. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to visualization of textual data that depicts information on a continuum (temporal or spatial) allowing inferences to be made about thematic organization of a document and its structure. Our visualization method—termed ThemeTrack—creates a visual map: delineating key themes and tracking their presence throughout the text, highlighting their variations and relationships. It aims to make the review of textual data more efficient. To assess the viability of the proposed approach, a series of experiments were conducted using graduate-level theses and published articles in the peer-reviewed journals. The applications of the proposed method are discussed and the real-word examples are provided.