HisVA: A Visual Analytics System for Studying History

TL;DR

HisVA is a visual analytics system designed to facilitate the exploration and understanding of historical events through interactive views, enabling users to investigate relationships in space and time from Wikipedia data.

Contribution

The paper introduces HisVA, a novel visual analytics tool that enhances historical data exploration with multiple coordinated views and supports spontaneous investigation.

Findings

Effective event exploration space for users

Qualitative insights into user exploration strategies

Positive expert feedback and successful in-class deployment

Abstract

Studying history involves many difficult tasks. Examples include searching for proper data in a large event space, understanding stories of historical events by time and space, and finding relationships among events that may not be apparent. Instructors who extensively use well-organized and well-argued materials (e.g., textbooks and online resources) can lead students to a narrow perspective in understanding history and prevent spontaneous investigation of historical events, with the students asking their own questions. In this work, we proposed HisVA, a visual analytics system that allows the efficient exploration of historical events from Wikipedia using three views: event, map, and resource. HisVA provides an effective event exploration space, where users can investigate relationships among historical events by reviewing and linking them in terms of space and time. To evaluate our system, we present two usage scenarios, a user study with a qualitative analysis of user exploration strategies, and %expert feedback with in-class deployment results.