Reactions:Information visualization for text analysis.

This chapter from Search User Interfaces talks about information visualization for text analysis. This chapter talks about multiple ways and tools for visualizing mined text. First section of chapter talks about strategies like text mining to find important words in text and relation or connection between words. There are multiple tools talked about in very brief which provide this functionalities. It talks about TAKMI for text mining for call center; Jigsaw system for analyzing relationship between entities or word; BETA system for IBM fountain for data exploration using Tilebar. However all of them are talked with very less detail and some screen shot.

Then chapter talks about analyzing words and text by extracting concordances and display them in context. It discussed way very common way to view accordance is to display word for interest in center and others around it by relevancy. For this it talks about tools like SeeSoft and TextArc which differ in display of concordance. SeeSoft display’s concordance in columns and TextArc display’s concordance in spiral with connection to words. Then it also talks about tag clouds used in websites and few other ways for displaying concordance and relativity between words. Chapter also discusses about displaying relation between citations in literature. One of visualization discussed in chapter uses graph with nodes and link for displaying relationship between authors and documents.

I feel chapter describes very basics and introductory information about visualization for text mining and its tools. It talks about tools but not in detail and just provides screen shots which I feel is of very less use if I want to create tool for this purpose. This chapter would have been more informative if would have discussed about detailed process of mining information and how tools process information for visualization.