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Meaningful Clouds: Towards a novel interface for document visualization

Dan WattersHCI Topics

DePaul University

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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?

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

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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.

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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.

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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

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Tag Cloud

• Just Links (There Is No File system) if you've got enough links, you don't need the hierarchy anymore.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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A web page utilizing tag-based navigation (tag cloud as user interface) Classic

hierarchical list

Navigable information based on tags instead of rigid list hierarchy…

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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

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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.

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Amber Frid-Jiminez

The mountain peaks represent the tagged focus points of the semantic landscape

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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.

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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!)

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• CloudMine: a proposed tool for visualizing document meaning…

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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.