Integrating Interactive Visualizations in the Search Process of Digital Libraries and IR Systems

TL;DR

This paper presents the integration of interactive visualizations into a digital library's search system, enhancing exploration, filtering, and understanding of search data through user-friendly graphics and interaction techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a set of interactive visualizations tailored for digital libraries, demonstrating their effectiveness in improving search exploration and user insights.

Findings

Users can intuitively gain insights from visualizations.

Interactive graphics support effective filtering and exploration.

Users adopt interaction techniques successfully.

Abstract

Interactive visualizations for exploring and retrieval have not yet become an integral part of digital libraries and information retrieval systems. We have integrated a set of interactive graphics in a real world social science digital library. These visualizations support the exploration of search queries, results and authors, can filter search results, show trends in the database and can support the creation of new search queries. The use of weighted brushing supports the identification of related metadata for search facets. We discuss some use cases of the combination of IR systems and interactive graphics. In a user study we verify that users can gain insights from statistical graphics intuitively and can adopt interaction techniques.