Organic Visualization of Document Evolution

TL;DR

This paper introduces an organic visualization system that displays fine-grained document evolution data, revealing writing strategies, editing density, and structure, based on keystroke-level data from student writing processes.

Contribution

It presents a novel data structure and visualization method for understanding detailed document writing evolution, supported by a pilot study.

Findings

Revealed writing strategies and editing patterns

Identified local edition density and hierarchical text structure

Demonstrated system's potential through promising pilot results

Abstract

Recent availability of data of writing processes at keystroke-granularity has enabled research on the evolution of document writing. A natural step is to develop systems that can actually show this data and make it understandable. Here we propose a data structure that captures a document's fine-grained history and an organic visualization that serves as an interface to it. We evaluate a proof-of-concept implementation of the system through a pilot study with documents written by students at a public university. Our results are promising and reveal facets such as general strategies adopted, local edition density and hierarchical structure of the final text.