[Visinfo] response to reading

[Stacy Rebich]

Well, here it is


 

Response to “Visualizing Knowledge Domains” by Katy Börner, Chaomei Chen,
and Kevin W. Boyack

 

I enjoyed reading this chapter because it was a good (if relatively
superficial) introduction to a variety of data reduction and information
visualization techniques that are in use and under development.  I think it
will be a great resource for future exploration of topics in infoviz since
the bibliography is so extensive.  I have to admit that since I’m not
familiar with many of the statistical/mathematical/programming techniques or
fundamentals, the actual concepts that underlie several of the techniques
described remain something of a mystery to me.  As I was reading the
descriptions, I kept thinking, “it would be really useful to have an
illustration for each of these,” and then when I got to the end, I realized
that the first endnote provides a link to online illustrations.  After
looking at these images, the features of the visualizations created through
the various approaches became somewhat more apparent.

 

Beyond the specifics of how the individual algorithms work, there is another
thing that I’m somewhat confused about.  This applies not necessarily only
to the techniques described in this chapter, but also to the online tools
that I saw when browsing the links on the course website. My question is
this:  what data type/format is necessary as input type for each
method/software package?  Which of these approaches require data that has
already been organized/reduced in some way, and which are suitable for
processing natural language text?  I think that in many cases there will
first be a categorization step and then a data reduction step, but I’m still
unsure about how to choose programs that can help me do each of these.  For
example, of those that can be used for semantic information visualization,
which require that I know the keywords before beginning, and which will find
them for me?  Which are suitable only for visualizing things that are
already discrete entities (authors, papers, etc.)?  I didn’t find very
specific descriptions of many of the tools anywhere.

 

I guess what I would be interested in seeing is some sort of decision tree
or something like that that could help me identify potential viable
approach-software combinations for the sorts of analysis/visualization I
would like to do.

 

There are two comments in the paper that have helped me to decide on what
sort of project I’d like to do for this class.  The first is a comment on
page 2 of the pdf version: it’s about how one of the problems with
traditional approaches to painting the big picture of scientific knowledge
is that the survey methods used are subjective.  This comment seems to apply
that these automated approaches are objective (or at least more objective).
Later in the paper, the authors also mention that multiple representations
are preferred to achieve a better understanding of the information content.
These comments make me think that it would be interesting to implement
several of these approaches on a modestly-sized dataset in order to compare
the different visualization solutions they arrive at.  I’ll talk about this
project idea in my presentation.

 

That’s it!  I welcome comments, suggestions, or answers to any of my
questions. ;)

Stacy

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Stacy Rebich

Graduate Student

Department of Geography

University of California

Santa Barbara, CA 93106

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