A Visualization Method of Browsing History to Support Reflection on Information Gathering Behavior

Abstract

Browsing history is the data that records the information gathering behavior through the Internet in many situations in our lives, and is a part of the lifelog that records and stores personal experiences. This study aims to utilize the browsing history as a record of daily life, focusing on self-reflection, which is the process of analyzing past actions to gain self-understanding and behavior improvement. The proposed system supports the recall of contents of browsed web pages by analyzing the topics in the browsing history, and the recall of the background of browsing by visualizing the browsing history based on the topics and the browsing time series. In order to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed system, we conducted an evaluation using actual browsing histories as input. The results showed that the system provided sufficient support for content recall when the feature words of the web pages were successfully extracted. As for the background recall, the visualization of the browsing history using the combination of the topics and the time series helped the subject recall the thoughts and events of the time. Also the proposed system provided useful reflections on the information gathering behavior and life at that time.