UNCC College of Computing and Informatics

Graduate Seminar (2009 Fall)

Title: Visualizing Document Activity over Time

Xiaoyu Wang

Ph.D student

Department of Computer Science

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

October 23 at 3:00pm
106 Woodward

Abstract:

In enterprise environments, knowledge workers must manage their activities around information, including office documents, emails, and Web pages. Keeping track of this information is difficult because it requires interacting with a heterogeneous set of software applications. In particular, re-finding a document, reconstructing an activity, or remembering a person’s name can be labor-intensive processes requiring detective work and the use of multiple applications. To address these problems, we built a visualization tool, TASTE (Temporal Activities and Story TElling), which organizes and visualizes information about documents, people, and activities. TASTE can be run on each client machine in an enterprise. It logs user activities with documents and then visualizes the resulting information in a way that shows the progress of activities through time. This paper describes TASTE and reports on our lab and field studies of it. Our studies indicate that participants often found it more efficient to reconstruct activities using TASTE.

Bio:

I am a forth year Ph.D. student of Computer Science at UNC Charlotte and a member of the Data Visualization Group (DVG) at the Charlotte Visualization Center. My Research focuses on understanding knowledge-assisted visualization to construct a mixed-initiative visualization environment. In addition, I work on visualizing geo-spatial temporal pattern. Currently, my primary projects involve augmenting visualization with knowledge sources. My previous work includes visualizing document activities for knowledge works in an enterprise environment (with Eric A. Bier (PARC)); providing cohesive visual analytics system for bridge managements (with USDOT); supporting visual analysis of the Global Terrorism Database (collaboration with START center); and with Danyel Fisher (Microsoft Research) on visualizing heterogeneous information to centralize and analyze network operations, etc.

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