Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Reaction: Information visualization for text analysis

This chapter increased my awareness of the multitude of visualizations that exist for text today. I have been more recently exposed to word cloud paradigms on behalf of my group's visualization project in order to better understand and improve the handling relationships and associations between sets of text and individual words. This article has provided me with different perspectives into visualizing text attributes and relationships.

Hearst also covers some of the motivation for our word cloud project. Many of the word or tag cloud visualization applications available today provide no sort of insight into how these words are associated and placement of words is very randomized. In addition, color and rotational transformation of words usually hold no significance. Thus, a richer user experience can be provided using these visualizations by integrating the relationships and association among the text parsed.

This chapter also gives a great overview of how much research is being conducted on the visualization of text. Numerical data can be visualized in straightforward ways since data points can be easily measured and compared. Text is very unique in which it can hold different meanings among different cultures and individuals. So the true challenges come with the multi-faceted significance of each word.

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