ProvThreads: Analytic Provenance Visualization and Segmentation

TL;DR

ProvThreads is a visual analytics tool that visualizes analytic provenance and user interactions over topics during exploratory text analysis, aiding understanding of analysts' strategies and investigation progression.

Contribution

It introduces ProvThreads, a novel interactive visualization approach that combines topic modeling with provenance tracking to analyze and segment analytic processes.

Findings

Visualizes topic coverage and investigation progression over time

Tracks user interests in topics dynamically during analysis

Reveals changes in focus throughout the analytic process

Abstract

Our work aims to generate visualizations to enable meta-analysis of analytic provenance and aid better understanding of analysts' strategies during exploratory text analysis. We introduce ProvThreads, a visual analytics approach that incorporates interactive topic modeling outcomes to illustrate relationships between user interactions and the data topics under investigation. ProvThreads uses a series of continuous analysis paths called topic threads to demonstrate both topic coverage and the progression of an investigation over time. As an analyst interacts with different pieces of data during the analysis, interactions are logged and used to track user interests in topics over time. A line chart shows different amounts of interest in multiple topics over the duration of the analysis. We discuss how different configurations of ProvThreads can be used to reveal changes in focus throughout an analysis.