标题: Presenting Time-Evolving Activities Using Communication Archive Data [打印本页] 作者: 彬彬 时间: 2011-12-30 18:39 标题: Presenting Time-Evolving Activities Using Communication Archive Data 1 Introduction
With the growing use of online communication (e.g., email or instant
message), communication data becomes rich in multiple dimensions.
The data silently record our daily activities over the
years, and the ability to collect and utilize such data can help to
recall our everyday lives. However, the browsing of thousands of
communication messages is tedious, and there is no effective ways
to present past activities and interesting events to users. In this extended
abstract, we present a visualization system that is designed
for presenting the underlying personal activities found within large
communication data. The visualization of communication archives
aims to provide a qualitative view of the data, and can be brought to
casual users. We characterize each person according to the communication
volume, structures, and history. With the aid of animation,
the system depicts the communication activities and the change of
relations over time. By using the visualization, users can extend
their memory from the messaging behaviors to the details of their
past activities.
2 Overview
Communication records are the essential information to build the
visualization. We first extract the information provided by a message,
including sender, receiver(s), content, timestamp. Then each
person is characterized as a “glyph” by stacking the communication
records around the person. People who share similar communication
history would look similar. The system also calculates
the closeness score between two people by using the communication
history between them for every time step, and place them on
the screen using a force-directed placement algorithm [Fruchterman
and Reingold 1991]. Finally, each message is visualized as an
instance when the animation is played back.
3 Characterizing each Person using Communication
Records
In the visualization, the nodes are used to represent the individuals.
To further understand the social position of an individual, we utilize
e-mail:fforestking,soididg@cmlab.csie.ntu.edu.tw
ye-mail:robin@ntu.edu.tw
ze-mail:ma@cs.ucdavis.edu
the communication records between two people to visually encode
the nodes as “glyphs” to help to disclose the types of these people.
Formally, a node i at time t is defined as Nt
i = (Ct
i ;Ht
i ), where
Ct
i is the center circle of Ni, and Ht
i = fht
ij : 1 j nig formulates
the histograms formed by messages. ht
ij here stands for a
bin j stacked by a set of messages sent before time t, and ni is the
number of message sets of the node i. As shown in Figure 1(Left),
the messages are visualized as small colored circles to form the
message histograms surrounding the node, and the bins are evenly
distributed on the circumference. In our design, the messages belonging
to the same conversations are grouped together and stacked
in the same bins. Figure 1(Middle) shows that in an example visualization
of email data, people who share similar communication
history look similar in our “glyph” design.
4 Presenting Activities using Communication
Records
Animation is used to present the time-evolving communication activities.
The design principle is that people who are close to each
other is placed near on the screen. When playback animation, the
message is visualized as an instance emitted from the sender to the
receiver(s), with a tail following it. Figure 1(Right) shows the example
animation of the email data, there is obvious group messaging
behavior happened within a certain period of time.
5 Conclusion and Future Work
Communication archives are passive life-log materials that most
people have. When using our designed system to visualize these
sentiment and meaning communication archives, users are surprised
to extend their memory from the communication activities
to the details of their past events. In the future, we would improve
the usability of the interaction model and generalize the visualization
to other data.
References
FRUCHTERMAN, T. M. J., AND REINGOLD, E. M. 1991. Graph
drawing by force-directed placement. Software, Practice and
