Transcript Multidimensional Data Analysis

The NewsHound Project Presents:
IS 247 Information Visualization and Presentation
10 May 2002
James Reffell
Moryma Aydelott
Jean-Anne Fitzpatrick
Project Overview
• Goals
– Exploration of themes in web-based news over
time and by geographic region
• Purposes and target audiences
– For professional media critics, a overview tool that
complements existing resources (Google, LexisNexis)
– For news enthusiasts, an exploration tool that is
both informative and fun
Today’s presentation
• Describe and demonstrate our system
– Brief overview
– Visualization aspects of system
• Discuss and present concepts for future
work
Data and Metadata
• Data:
– Text of international news web site front pages, collected
daily
• Metadata:
– Geographical: region and country associated with each site
– Temporal: date associated with each page
• System features
– Filtering: by date range and by geography / site
– Aggregation: by date and by geography
Implementation
• Data collection and initial HTML/text
processing in Perl
• MySQL database for hierarchical geographic
metadata
• Remaining functions in Java / JSP:
– Indexing and search using Lucene
– Custom routines for data aggregation and scaling
– Chart applets using Kavachart
Related work
• News:
– ThemeScape / NewsMaps
– Galaxy of News
• Text data:
– Conversation map
– SeeSoft
• General visualization principles:
– Tufte
– Kosslyn, McKinlay, Bertin
Approach: What we didn’t do
• An extremely novel visualization
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Approach: What we did
• Line charts
– A familiar and readily understandable visualization, applied to a
novel data set
– Overview with access to details (text and numerical data) on
demand
• Small multiples
– Comparison
– Detection of outliers
• Multiple views combining graphical and tabular data
– Single chart plus query preview table
– Small multiple charts plus summary table
– Full text with KWIC highlighting
• Visual elements of UI design
– Pre-attentive cues (color)
– Gestalt cues (grouping)
System Demo
http://www.breakingstory.org
User Testing
• User testing focused on interaction design,
but also encompassed visualization
• Questions:
– Did users understand what chart data
represented?
– Was the single chart representation
comprehensible and useful?
– Were multiple charts comprehensible and useful?
– How closely should the full text view match the
source site layout?
(Results: not at first, yes, yes, perfectly or not at all)
Design Changes
• Major user test finding related to
visualization: need to normalize data across
charts (references per page per day, rather
than just references per day)
• Other visualization-related changes:
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Y-axis values on small chart view
Improved X-axis scales, varied by time range
Highlighting entire sentence on full text view
Change icon to provide visual cue about
availability of multiple query terms per chart
Future work
• Many possibilities for visualization of this data!
• System expansion possible in many areas (e.g.,
search capabilities, natural language processing,
breadth or depth of corpus). Each of these changes
would impact the visualization design.
• One concept for visualization we’ve explored in
detail: combining line chart with additional views,
dynamic interaction
Conclusions
• Affordances of visual representation
complement text
• Even for “simple” visualizations,
understanding core principles aids
design
• Interaction design and visualization
design may compete for attention, but
both improve the resulting system
Questions?
For more information on the NewsHound project, go to our
project website:
http://dream.sims.berkeley.edu/newshound
To explore the Breaking Story system, go to:
www.breakingstory.org
To see a more comprehensive demo of the system, come to our
final project presentation on Tuesday!