Reaction: INFORMATION VISUALIZATION FOR TEXT ANALYSIS

This paper aims at describing how effectively we can incorporate visualization into text. This would not just be simple text records but the text that the analysts are looking for. After the initial paragraphs it made me think about this idea. We always say that pictures speak louder than words. However there are some areas where you have just the text and not the pictures. The examples provided by the authors are apt like the telephone log or results returned by a search. In both the above cases you will just have 'boring' text before the analysts. Idea of the paper is that what if we could apply visualizations to the text mining domain?

To continue, the first section of the paper talks exactly about this. How visualization can be applied to the text mining. I could figure it out a bit but this section is too cluttered with examples and a lot of examples. I would have liked some introductory text and then examples to fortify your views. Instead the authors have just cited the examples and the section ends.

Word clouds have also been discussed in the second part of the paper. Here the authors make a statement that the tag clouds are not effective in terms of overall representation and finding any particular word. I have worked on some projects related specifically to words and there I came across the same thing that words can be searched easily and can be better represented in a word list than a fancy cloud or a tag cloud. Next it also discusses about the categorical and nominal variables. I agree with their statement that they are difficult to fit in some visualization because of their non-ordering nature. However the namevoyager is a cool viz and we have gone through it in the class before.

In the end authors have discussed citation analysis and it is related to the above two ideas of the text mining and the concordance analysis. This paper was a good read for people who are new ti text mining however I personally think that the authors could have presented their thoughts in a more better manner as compared to their current presentation. Instead of giving too many examples, they could have explained the concepts in a more better way and then cited the examples.