Storylines: Visual exploration and analysis in latent semantic spaces

Tasks in visual analytics differ from typical information retrieval tasks in fundamental ways. A critical part of a visual analytics is to ask the right questions when dealing with a diverse collection of information. In this article, we introduce the design and application of an integrated exploratory visualization system called Storylines. Storylines provides a framework to enable analysts visually and systematically explore and study a body of unstructured text without prior knowledge of its thematic structure. The system innovatively integrates latent semantic indexing, natural language processing, and social network analysis. The contributions of the work include providing an intuitive and directly accessible representation of a latent semantic space derived from the text corpus, an integrated process for identifying salient lines of stories, and coordinated visualizations across a spectrum of perspectives in terms of people, locations, and events involved in each story line. The system is tested with the 2006 VAST contest data, in particular, the portion of news articles.