1. Wise, Thomas, Pennock, Lantrip, Pottier, Schur, and Crow
Visualizing the Non-Visual Spatial Analysis and Interaction with Information from Text Documents
Wise, Thomas, Pennock, Lantrip, Pottier, Schur, and Crow
Presented By: Cyntrica Eaton

3. Presentation of documents where
similar ones cluster together
Clicking on a star in Galaxies, the words that occur most in the document(s) appear on the screen
To further explore, selecting a “docustar” retrieves the document header or complete text
Enter queries on terms of interest and “docustar” of interest light up like “novas” on the screen.

4. Exhibit in the landscape reveal
intricate interconnection of themes
the transformation of themes across the whole of the document corpus

5. Presentation Overview
Paper Description
Contributions
Current State
Critique
References

6. Paper Description Motivation Approach Visualization Paradigms Galaxies
Themescapes

7. MVAB Multidimensional Visualization and Advanced Browsing Project
Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories were interested in solving the problem of information overload for Intelligence analysts.
Large corpora: digital libraries, regulations and procedures, archived reports

8. Motivation
Modern information technologies have contributed to an increased availability of information.
Accompanying the increasing quantity of available information is a subsequently decreasing quantity of time to locate and absorb it.
The ability to overview large document corpora and get information without the heavy cognitive processes involved in language processing will improve the search process.
Peruse large amounts of text to detect and recognize informational patterns and pattern irregularities across various sources
Market analysis
Environmental assessment
Law enforcement
Intelligence for national security
Enhance visual browsing and analysis
Need to read and assess large amounts of text

9. Approach
Problem of processing large amounts of text can be solved if text is spatialized in manner that takes advantage of human perceptual abilities.
Visual processing take place in parallel on the retinal level and is:
Relatively effortless
Exceptionally fast
Not additive to cognitive workload
Prewired elements used to quickly build up components of complex visual images.

10. Approach Transform text into visualizations that:
Communicate through images instead of prose.
Preserve information characteristics from documents.
Represent textual content and meaning without the need to read it in the normal manner.
Reveal thematic patterns and relationships between documents in ways in which the natural world is perceived.
Enhance visual browsing and analysis
Combat information overload
Large corpora: digital libraries, regulations and procedures, archived reports
For the purpose of perusing text, better to transform text information to a spatial representation which can be explore and processed by visual processes alone

11. SPIRE Spatial Paradigm for Information Retrieval and Exploration
Developed to facilitate the browsing and selection of documents from large corpora
Two major approaches:
Galaxies
Themescapes
(20,000 documents)

12. Galaxies and Themescapes
Display metaphor rationale:
Each paradigm offers a rich variety of cognitive spatial affordances that naturally address the problems of text visualization.
Spatial perceptual mechanisms that operate on the real world will respond analogously to synthetic cues.

13. Paradigm Overviews Galaxies Themescapes
Point clusters suggest patterns of interest
Themescapes
Topographies of peaks and valleys that can easily be detected based on contour patterns.

14. Paradigm Overviews
Both allow for overview + detail without a change of view.
Each view offers a different perspective of the same information.

15. Galaxies
Two-dimensional scatterplot of ‘docupoints’ that appear like stars in the night sky.
Computes word similarities and patterns in documents and communicates similarity via proximity.
Provides a first cut at sifting through information and determining how the contents of a document base are related.
context and content

16. Types Treatment Case Studies ….. Presentation of documents where
similar ones cluster together
Clicking on a star in Galaxies, the words that occur most in the document(s) appear on the screen
To further explore, selecting a “docustar” retrieves the document header or complete text
Enter queries on terms of interest and “docustar” of interest light up like “novas” on the screen.
Spatial representation reveals patterns and trends fundamental topics found within corpus and clicking on a cluster of interest reveals the documents within
Temporal slicer
When viewed in terms of known historical events and trends, these cluster patterns can provide insight into external causal relationships mirrored in the corpus.
Types
Treatment
Case Studies
…..

17. Types Treatment Case Studies ….. Presentation of documents where
similar ones cluster together
Clicking on a star in Galaxies, the words that occur most in the document(s) appear on the screen
To further explore, selecting a “docustar” retrieves the document header or complete text
Enter queries on terms of interest and “docustar” of interest light up like “novas” on the screen.
Spatial representation reveals patterns and trends fundamental topics found within corpus and clicking on a cluster of interest reveals the documents within
Temporal slicer
When viewed in terms of known historical events and trends, these cluster patterns can provide insight into external causal relationships mirrored in the corpus.
Types
Treatment
Case Studies
…..

19. Themescapes
Three-dimensional relief map of themes within the document corpora themes.
Complex surfaces convey information about topics or themes found within the corpus without cognitive load of reading
Terrain simultaneously communicates:
Primary themes of an arbitrarily large collection of documents.
Measure of relevance in the corpus.
Similarity of themes.
Themescapes reads large collections of documents and organizes the content by topic as a  topographical map.

20. Themescapes
Glance provides visual thematic summary of the entire corpus
Elevation: Theme strength
Shapes: Information distribution
Proximity: Content Similarity
The mountains in Themescape indicate where themes are dominant; valleys indicate weak themes.
Their shapes--a broad butte or high pinnacle--reflect how the thematic information is distributed and related across documents
Themes close in content will be close visually based on the many relationships within the text spaces.

21. Themescapes
Utilizes human abilities for pattern recognition and spatial reasoning
Employs communicative invariance across levels of textual scale
Entire document corpus
Cluster of documents
Individual documents
innate human
Greatly expands bandwidth of communication between tool and user
Themes close in content will be close visually based on the many relationships within the text spaces.

23. Summarization
Reading is a slow, serial process of mentally encoding a document.
Text visualizations can overcome much of the user limitations that result from accessing and trying to read from large document bases.
One very interesting result has been the discovery of a limited set of visual properties that are processed preattentively, without the need for focused attention. Typically, tasks that can be performed on large multi-element displays in less than 200 to 250msec are considered preattentive. Eye movements take at least 200msec to initiate, and random locations of the elements in the display ensure that attention cannot be prefocused on any particular location, yet subjects report that these tasks can be completed with very little effort. This suggests that certain information in the display is processed in parallel by the low-level visual system. A simple example of a preattentive task is the detection of a red circle in a group of blue circles (see Figure 1 below).

24. Summarization
Visual cues can offer readers a way to employ their primarily preattentive, parallel processing powers of visual perception.
Galaxy and landscape metaphors allow the cognitive and visual processes that enable our spatial interactions with the natural world to be applied to the search process.

25. Contributions
Prior visualization approaches offered methods for visualization of structured, hierarchical text.
Free text visualization was relatively unexamined.
MVAB Project produced novel methods for interaction with large amounts of text. :
organization charts
Directories
Open text fields or raw prose candidates for visualization not obvious

26. Current Project Status
Correlation Tool
WebTheme
ThemeRiver
Rainbow

27. Tool deployed apart of the SPIRE Info Viz suite Spatial Paradigm for Information Retrieval and Exploration
Researchers can refine their search by using several built-in support functions inducing a document characterization or gisting tool, a work search tool, a time analyzers and an annotation tool.
Correlation tool gives users the power to examine relationships between user defined variables

28. Web enable version of SPIRE provides a new way to investigate and understand large volumes of textual information Harvest data from WWW using search terms, or by following links derived form user specified URLs. Currently underdevelopment
Initially created for U.S. Intelligence community

29. Help users identify time related patterns, trends, and relationships across large collection of documents
Themes represented by a river that flows from left to right through time
Widens or narrows to show changes in collective strength of themes in the doc
Individual themes, colored currents flowing in the river
Theme currents narrow or widen to indicate changes in individual theme strength at any point in time.
Proof of concept prototype constructed

30. Love Tybalt Caesar Romeo
Portrays three different classes of relationships
Entities are dots
Location represents summarization of one kind of relationships among them
Arcs above plane: white arc between two planes indicates that such a rel. exits between entities within the clusters….white arc can be expanded to show mult. Colors in spectrum indicating existence of a particular kind of relationship within this class
User wants to see if relationships between to
Arcs below the plane
Interactive proof of concept prototype developed
Correlation tool gives users the power to examine relationships between user defined variables
Romeo

31. Critique
The visualization paradigms were discussed in a straight-forward manner.
There was, however, a deficiency of example figure explanations.

32. My Favorite Sentence
[The] perceptual processes involved are the results of millions of years of selective mammalian and primate evolution, and have become biologically tuned to seeing in the natural world.

33. References
Information Retrieval
Information Visualization

34. Visualizing the Non-Visual Spatial Analysis and Interaction with Information from Text Documents
Questions?

35. Technical Considerations
Clear definition of text
Way to transform text into a different visual form that retains high dimensional invariants of natural language.
Suitable mathematical procedures and analytical measures must be defined as the foundation of the visualizations
Database management system must be designed to store and manage text
How can text be distinguished from everything else
Yet better enables visual exploration and analysis
Clear definition of text
Text is written alphabetical form of natural languages (no diagrams or tables or other symbolic representations of language)
Suitable mathematical procedures and analytical measures must be defined as the foundation of the visualizations
Written text stored in digital form can be treated statistically to extract information about its content and context and semantic meaning
Database management system must be designed to store and manage text
Primarily comprised of textual material
Text processing engine which transforms natural language from the the document database to spatial data.
Other components
GUI
Display software
Applications interface
Auxiliary tools

36. Technical Considerations
Way to transform text into a different visual form that retains high dimensional invariants of natural language.
Text has statistical and semantic attributes such as frequency and context and combination of words in themes and topics
Differences between texts statistical and semantic compositions provide much of opportunity for text visualizations described in this paper.
How can text be distinguished from everything else
Yet better enables visual exploration and analysis

37. Approach
A set of measures which characterize the text in meaningful ways provide for multiple perspective of documents and their relationships to one another.
One measure is similarity
Based on occurrences and context of key words or other extracted features measure of similarity can be computed that reflect relatedness between documents.
In a visualization, similarity can be shown as proximity or congruity to form.