The Shape of Shakespeare: Visualizing Text using Implicit Surfaces

  • Authors:

  • Randall M. Rohrer;John L. Sibert;David S. Ebert

  • Affiliations:

  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • INFOVIS '98 Proceedings of the 1998 IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

Information visualization focuses on the use of visual means for exploring non-visual information. While free-form text is a rich, common source of information, visualization of text is a challenging problem since text is inherently non-spatial. This paper explores the use of implicit surface models for visualizing text. We describe several techniques for text visualization that aid in understanding document content and document relationships. A simple method is defined for mapping document content to shape. By comparing the shapes of multiple documents, global content similarities and differences may be noted. In addition, we describe a visual clustering method in which documents are arranged in 3D based upon similarity scoring. Documents deemed closely related blend together as a single connected shape. Hence, a document corpus becomes a collection of shapes that reflect inter-document relationships. These techniques provide methods to visualize individual documents as well as corpus meta-data. We then combine the two techniques to produce transparent clusters enclosing individual document shapes. This provides a way to visualize both local and global contextual information. Finally, we elaborate on several potential applications of these methods.