Communication Analysis through Visual Analytics: Current Practices, Challenges, and New Frontiers

Abstract

<div>The automated analysis of digital human communication data often focuses on specific aspects like content or network structure in isolation, while classical communication research stresses the importance of a holistic analysis approach. This work aims to formalize digital communication analysis and investigate how classical results can be leveraged as part of visually interactive systems, which offers new analysis opportunities to allow for less biased, skewed, or incomplete results. For this, we construct a conceptual framework and design space based on the existing research landscape, technical considerations, and communication research that describes the properties, capabilities, and composition of such systems through 30 criteria in four analysis dimensions. We make the case how visual analytics principles are uniquely suited for a more holistic approach by tackling the automation complexity and leverage domain knowledge, paving the way to generate design guidelines for building such approaches. Our framework provides a common language and description of communication analysis systems to support existing research, highlights relevant design areas while promoting and supporting the mutual exchange between researchers. Additionally, our framework identifies existing gaps and highlights opportunities in research areas that are worth investigating further. With this contribution, we pave the path for the formalization of digital communication analysis through visual analytics.</div>

Promoting Ethical Awareness in Communication Analysis: Investigating Potentials and Limits of Visual Analytics for Intelligence Applications

“…Digital communication analysis as a research field has no universally accepted definition, with different understandings in different domains. In this work, we follow the definition by Fischer et al [34], considering it to encompass the computer-mediated [35] analysis of meaningful digital [91] information exchanges between humans [85]. The analysis relates not only to the actual content (text, audio, or video), but also encompasses accompanying meta-data as well as communication network structures.…”

“…To date, ethical concerns related to automated communications analysis have been described mainly from either a strictly sociological and/or ethical perspective [46] or in the context of technical capabilities [34,36,101]. Much less work, by contrast, addresses the complex techno-ethical tensions and dilemmas that arise in the messy gray areas of socio-technical feasibility, given the limits and consequences induced by the alleged solutions.…”

“…Through these aspects, VA can better handle ill-defined or open-ended taskswhich often occur in criminal intelligence, law, or investigative journalism -than fully-automated systems. Through human oversight, VA is well-suited for designing and operating meaningful interactive communication analysis systems that consider the ethical challenges outlined above and which we discuss in more detail in the following sections, ease their technical implementation, and allow for an interactive and iterative knowledge generation process [34].…”