Title:  Finding What to Read: Visual Text Analytics Tools and Techniques to Guide Investigation

Abstract:  Text is one of the most prominent forms of open data available, from social media to legal cases. Text visualizations are often critiqued for not being useful, for being unstructured and presenting data out of context (think: word clouds). I argue that we should not expect them to be a replacement for reading. In this talk I will briefly discuss the close/distant reading debate then focus on where I think text visualization can be useful: hypothesis generation and guiding investigation. Text visualization can help someone form questions about a large text collection, then drill down to investigate through targeted reading of the underlying source texts. Over the past 10 years my research focus has been primarily on creating techniques and systems for text analytics using visualization, across domains as diverse as legal studies, poetics, social media, and automotive safety.  I will review several of my past projects with particular attention to the capabilities and limitations of the technologies and tools we used, how we use semantics to structure visualizations, and the importance of providing interactive links to the source materials. In addition, I will discuss the design challenges which, while common across visualization, are particularly important with text (legibility, label fitting, finding appropriate levels of ‘zoom’).

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The ACM SIGCHI conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS’17) is in full swing in Edinburgh, with a strong presence of SACHI research, especially in the area of Data Physicalization! Check out our related pictorial, full paper, workshop and workshop paper:

Trevor Hogan, Uta Hinrichs and Eva Hornecker. The Visual and Beyond: Characterizing Experiences with Auditory, Haptic and Visual Data Representations. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS’17), pp. 797-809, 2017.

Samuel Huron, Pauline Gourlet, Uta Hinrichs, Trevor Hogan and Yvonne Jansen. Let’s Get Physical: Promoting Data Physicalization in Workshop Formats. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS’17), pp. 1409-1422, 2017.

Fearn Bishop and Uta Hinrichs. Challenges of Running Constructive Visualization Studies with Children. In DIS’17 workshop on Pedagogy & Physicalization: Designing Learning Activities around Physical Data Representations.

Trevor Hogan, Uta Hinrichs, Yvonne Jansen, Samuel Huron, Pauline Gourlet, Eva Hornecker and Bettina Nissen. Pedagogy & Physicalization: Designing Learning Activities around Physical Data Representations. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS’17), 2017. http://dataphys.org/workshops/dis17/.

We have a SACHI seminar on Monday 12th June 2017 which will be given by two speakers, presenting two connected talks within the normal hour slot.

The speakers are Dr Oliver Schneider from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany and Professor Karon MacLean who is Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, Canada.
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