Reaction: Information Visualization for Text Analysis

                This chapter puts forth the applications of visualization in text-mining, the methods used in these visualizations to show correlations among objects across documents, and how visualization techniques are being used to extract meaning across syntactic and lexical ontologies.

The first section seems to focus solely on simple products that amount to examples within the field. Within my own work in text and data mining, these specific examples seem to provide a poor overview of the distribution of lexical analysis types and there probable use. The also seem to be quite limited in their capabilities to analyze associations and extensively expand on the implemented techniques used.

The second section, which re-covers many of the visualizations we have previously gone over, seems similar to the first section in that it is limited in it its breadth of visualization types and techniques. It is, however, helpful for my group’s particular project in that it discuss the pros and cons of these various techniques in some detail, and some of them we have looked at as possible project visualizations.

The third and final section is even more limited in its scope. Data analysis in text mining is a huge area of research, especially in mining scientific papers for previously unknown information elucidated through connections between possibly disparate articles and authors, and this paper limits itself simply to author citation analysis. This technique, when including a world view, is often incredibly unhelpful as citation techniques vary wildly from country to country. In China, citations are often of other Chinese papers which are plagiarized from non-chinese writers, where the original authorship is obfuscated. In Russia, specifically Moscow, where data falsification is especially rampant, citations are often minimalized to reduce the chances of falsified data being discovered, resulting in a falsely low connection rate.

Overall, as this is a chapter in a book, the material contained within could have been greatly expanded to cover more topics in a broader way.