Visual analysis of document triage data

Abstract

As part of the information seeking process, a large amount of effort is invested in order to study and understand how information seekers search through documents such that they can assess their relevance. This search and assessment of document relevance, known as document triage, is an important information seeking process, but is not yet well understood. Human-computer interaction (HCI) and digital library scientists have undertaken a series of user studies involving information seeking, collected a large amount of data describing information seekers' behavior during document search. Next to this, we have witnessed a rapid increase in the number of off-the-shelf visualization tools which can benefit document triage study. Here we set out to utilize existing information visualization techniques and tools in order to gain a better understanding of the large amount of user-study data collected by HCI and digital library researchers. We describe the range of available tools and visualizations we use in order to increase our knowledge of document triage. Treemap, parallel coordinates, stack graph, matrix chart, as well as other visualization methods, prove to be insightful in exploring, analyzing and presenting user behavior during document triage. Our findings and visualizations are evaluated by HCI and digital library researchers studying this problem