190 likes | 303 Views
Meaningful Clouds: Towards a novel interface for document visualization Dan Watters HCI Topics DePaul University. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. A text cloud as a method of visualizing a document? Hmm… I’ve heard a little about tag clouds… but what is a text cloud?
E N D
Meaningful Clouds: Towards a novel interface for document visualizationDan WattersHCI TopicsDePaul University HCI 594
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address • A text cloud as a method of visualizing a document? • Hmm… I’ve heard a little about tag clouds… but what is a text cloud? • Visualize a document – isn’t it just text? HCI 594
Popular web 2.0 social bookmarking websites such as Flikr, Delicious, and Connotea, apply user-generated keywords or “tags” in a flat, non-hierarchical manner known as “folksonomy” to their collective content in order to provide contextual meaning and improve findability. HCI 594
Tags • A tag is a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (like picture, article, or video clip), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification of information it is applied to. • Tags are usually chosen informally and personally by the author/creator or the consumer of the item • Tag classification, and the concept of connecting sets of tags between web/blog servers, has lead to the rise of folksonomy classification • Tags are important mainly for what they leave out. By forgoing formal classification, tags enable a huge amount of user-produced organizational value, at vanishingly small cost. HCI 594
Folksonomy/Tag-based Classification • Flat • No levels, order, or explicit relationships • Not Exclusive • An item can be associated to many tags • Bottom-up • Created by users HCI 594
Tag Cloud • Just Links (There Is No File system) if you've got enough links, you don't need the hierarchy anymore. HCI 594
Taxonomy/Classical Classification • Hierarchical • Parent/child relationship • Exclusive • The same item can not be in two distinct categories • Top-down • Established by an expert authority HCI 594
Classical File System • Hierarchy. There's a top level, and subdirectories roll up under that. Subdirectories contain files or further subdirectories and so on, all the way down. HCI 594
Folksonomic Philosophy 101 • Users can create a better, more extendable experience for themselves by working together through a collaborative, social framework rather than enduring a structured set of rules governing how we think and act provided by a set of experts. • Tag Clouds = The collective users define the framework for collaboration and organization • Text Clouds = A framework is automatically extracted from document content via algorithmic simulation of the bottom-up folksonomic process. HCI 594
Visualizing a Tag Cloud The tag is the focal point of interest for a shared collection of users (often known as the semantic landscape). Frequency-of-Occurrence is used to measure the “weight” or relative importance of a tag HCI 594
Tag Clouds: "A New User Interface?" • We're seeing "a new user interface evolving out of tag data," • For context, tag clouds can be placed within a continuum of the evolution of web navigation, from list views to the new tag-based navigation emerging now. HCI 594
Navigable information based on tags instead of rigid list hierarchy… A web page utilizing tag-based navigation (tag cloud as user interface) Classic hierarchical list HCI 594
Could tag-clouds replace navigation menus? Is this a good idea? http://83degrees.com/# even del.icio.us and flickr have a basic website perma-navigation HCI 594
A Camera Obscura For the Semantic Landscape • I've come to think of a tag cloud as something like the flat image produced by a camera obscura. • Where the camera obscura renders a real-world landscape, a tag cloud shows a semantic landscape like those created by Amber Frid-Jimenez at MIT. HCI 594
Amber Frid-Jiminez The mountain peaks represent the tagged focus points of the semantic landscape HCI 594
In a text cloud, the focal points are viewed as nodes… extracted key phrases from the document content. The phrases have no relation to each other – only their connection as a subset of the document as a whole. HCI 594
A document can be seen as a series of peaks and valleys… with each peak representing a focal node – i.e. the most important extracted key phrases and their corresponding associated content. (The more important the key phrase… the taller the mountain peak!) HCI 594
CloudMine: a proposed tool for visualizing document meaning… HCI 594
CloudMine can be compared conceptually to Google Maps. The Categorizer provides a frame of reference such as a particular Nation, State, or geographic location, while the Summarizer represents an overview, or in our map analogy the “lay of the land” depicting a view of the map. Lastly, the extracted key phrases can be compared to geographic points-of-interest such as restaurants, gas stations, or a particular address. HCI 594