Visualizing Data with Parallel Tag Clouds

An interesting paper presented here at VisWeek, as part of VAST, comes from Christopher Collins Research.  They parsed a database of 600,000 US Circuit Court decisions over 50 years and created a text-visualization tool they call “Parallel Tag Clouds”.

The visualization technique combines graphical elements from parallel coordinates and traditional tag clouds to provide rich overviews of a document collection while acting as an entry point for exploration of individual texts. We augment basic parallel tag clouds with a details-in-context display and an option to visualize changes over a second facet of the data, such as time. We also address text mining challenges such as selecting the best words to visualize, and how to do so in reasonable time periods to maintain interactivity.

The full paper is available at their site.  See their demonstration video after the break.

via Christopher Collins: Research.

About the Author: Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .

Science paper, research, tag clouds, visweek