VarifocalReader — In-Depth Visual Analysis of Large Text Documents

Abstract

Interactive visualization provides valuable support for exploring, analyzing, and understanding textual documents. Certain tasks, however, require that insights derived from visual abstractions are verified by a human expert perusing the source text. So far, this problem is typically solved by offering overview-detail techniques, which present different views with different levels of abstractions. This often leads to problems with visual continuity. Focus-context techniques, on the other hand, succeed in accentuating interesting subsections of large text documents but are normally not suited for integrating visual abstractions. With VarifocalReader we present a technique that helps to solve some of these approaches' problems by combining characteristics from both. In particular, our method simplifies working with large and potentially complex text documents by simultaneously offering abstract representations of varying detail, based on the inherent structure of the document, and access to the text itself. In addition, VarifocalReader supports intra-document exploration through advanced navigation concepts and facilitates visual analysis tasks. The approach enables users to apply machine learning techniques and search mechanisms as well as to assess and adapt these techniques. This helps to extract entities, concepts and other artifacts from texts. In combination with the automatic generation of intermediate text levels through topic segmentation for thematic orientation, users can test hypotheses or develop interesting new research questions. To illustrate the advantages of our approach, we provide usage examples from literature studies.

VIANA: Visual Interactive Annotation of Argumentation

“…Several systems combine the close and distant reading metaphors to provide deeper insights into textual data, such as LeadLine [13] or EMDialog [30]. Koch et al [36] have developed a tool called VarifocalReader, which combines focus-and context-techniques to support the analysis of large text documents. The tool enables exploration of text through novel navigation methods and allows the extraction of entities and other concepts.…”

Visual Comparison of Eye Movement Patterns

“…The second eye tracking data set is from an evaluation of the VarifocalReader [BJK*16]. The VarifocalReader is a hierarchical navigation technique of large document collections [KJW*14]. Eight participants were analyzed and each transition graph represents one participant.…”

Constructive Visual Analytics for Text Similarity Detection

“…Koch et al . [KJW*14] present a method called VarifocalReader for examining a large corpus of text with multi‐level abstract representations. Jänicke et al .…”