T-Scroll: Visualizing trends in a time-series of documents for interactive user exploration

Abstract

On the Internet, a large number of documents such as news articles and online journals are delivered everyday. We often have to review major topics and topic transitions from a large time-series of documents, but it requires much time and effort to browse and analyze the target documents. We have therefore developed an information visualization system called T-Scroll (Trend/Topic-Scroll) to visualize the transition of topics extracted from those documents. The system takes periodical outputs of the underlying clustering system for a time-series of documents then visualizes the relationships between clusters as a scroll. Using its interaction facility, users can grasp the topic transitions and the details of topics for the target time period. This paper describes the idea, the functions, the implementation, and the evaluation of the T-Scroll system. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.