Co-Designing Unstructured Text Data Visualization Systems

TL;DR

This paper discusses the ongoing development of a visualization system for unstructured text data, emphasizing user-centered design and the need to explore multiple perspectives and narratives within large text corpora.

Contribution

It introduces a co-design approach involving professionals to identify key visualization needs for unstructured text analysis.

Findings

Identified unmet needs for visual exploration of entity-actor dynamics

Recognized the importance of visualizing multiple narratives in large corpora

Preliminary insights guide future prototype development

Abstract

We present our in-progress work on co-designing a visualization tool for presenting unstructured text. We have conducted a focus group with a variety of professionals who regularly analyze large corpora of unstructured text. Our preliminary insights indicate there is an unmet need to visually explore the dynamics between entities and actors extracted from unstructured text. Additionally, large corpora contain multiple perspectives on the same series of events. There is a need to disentangle these perspectives and visually show the multiple narratives present in the data. In our future work, we will co-design low-fidelity prototypes to create a broad consideration space of possible solutions for visualizing unstructured text.