This paper describes an approach to IV that involves spatializing text content for enhanced visual browsing and analysis. The application arena is large text document corpora such as digital libraries, regulations andprocedures, archived reports, etc. The basic idea is that text content from these sources may be transformed to a spatial representation that preserves informational characteristics from the documents. The spatial representation may then be visually browsed and analyzed in ways that avoid language processing and that reduce the analysts' mental workload. The result is an interaction with text that more nearly resembles perception and action with the natural world than with the abstractions of written language.
This article presents both theoretical and technical bases on which to build a “science of text visualization.” These conceptually produce “the ecological approach,” which is rooted in ecological and evolutionary psychology. The basic idea is that humans are genetically selected from their species history to perceptually interpret certain informational aspects of natural environments. If information from text documents is visually spatialized in a manner conformal with these predilections, its meaningful interpretation to the user of a text visualization system becomes relatively intuitive and accurate. The SPIRE text visualization system, which images information from free text documents as natural terrains, serves as an example of the “ecological approach” in its visual metaphor, its text analysis, and its spatializing procedures.
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