Reaction: Information visualization for text analysis

The main theme of this paper is to analyse data in a text. The authors have presented this analysis using visualization. What I liked about this paper is that the aim of the work is clearly defined in the start of the paper which includes text mining and use of visualization for the same; visualization of words or phrases and forming concordances of the same and finally visualizing the relationships between words and their usage in the language.

The paper has presented various techniques and all of them correspond to each of the visualization techniques discussed in the class. For text mining, the visualization techniques discussed includes TAKMI text mining system, JIGSAW system, BETA system and triage system. As discussed in the paper, amongst the four systems, even I found the triage system to be effective as a system for visualization. The icons and grouping of related items in this system proves to be effective for analysts while studying the data. The next attempt in this paper is to visualize concordances in the text and word frequencies. Amongst the methods described for this visualization, I liked the Sunburst (modified as the DocuBurst) method the most here. This system gives a good view of the text treemap and effectively links the words in a text. Baby Name Voyager is another example that had been discussed many times in the class and has been pointed as an effective method for visualization of text for analysis. Towards the end of this paper, the author discusses on methods for visualizing the numbers and relations between the citations. It has been observed that many of the works have been used as references and have been cited widely. This visualization discussion helps in analysing the most referred or cited work or field f work across the references. The linked bubble graph used here serves to be useful and helps for the purpose.

Thus this work gives us an overview of using visualization as a tool for analysing the text and data. It has provided us with an example for each of the techniques discussed in the class.