We present the results of a comprehensive multi-pass analysis of visualization paper keywords supplied by authors for their papers published in the IEEE Visualization conference series (now called IEEE VIS) between 1990–2015. From this analysis we derived a set of visualization topics that we discuss in the context of the current taxonomy that is used to categorize papers and assign reviewers in the IEEE VIS reviewing process. We point out missing and overemphasized topics in the current taxonomy and start a discussion on the importance of establishing common visualization terminology. Our analysis of research topics in visualization can, thus, serve as a starting point to (a) help create a common vocabulary to improve communication among different visualization sub-groups, (b) facilitate the process of understanding differences and commonalities of the various research sub-fields in visualization, (c) provide an understanding of emerging new research trends, (d) facilitate the crucial step of finding the right reviewers for research submissions, and (e) it can eventually lead to a comprehensive taxonomy of visualization research. One additional tangible outcome of our work is an online query tool ( http: keyvis.org ) that allows visualization researchers to easily browse the 3952 keywords used for IEEE VIS papers since 1990 to find related work or make informed keyword choices.
In the visualization and data analysis literature, the closest work to ours is Chuang al's @cite_1 machine learning tool for topic model diagnostics, and G "o rg al's @cite_19 visual text analysis using Jigsaw, and the CiteVis tool @cite_16 . These lines of work are not per se co-word analyses. However, their data sources also include visualization research papers. In contrast, we primarily focus on the results of our analysis of themes and trends in the visualization literature rather than on the description of any specific tool or algorithm.
@cite_19 @cite_16 @cite_1
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We propose a new unsupervised learning technique for extracting information from large text collections. We model documents as if they were generated by a two-stage stochastic process. Each author is represented by a probability distribution over topics, and each topic is represented as a probability distribution over words for that topic. The words in a multi-author paper are assumed to be the result of a mixture of each authors' topic mixture. The topic-word and author-topic distributions are learned from data in an unsupervised manner using a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm. We apply the methodology to a large corpus of 160,000 abstracts and 85,000 authors from the well-known CiteSeer digital library, and learn a model with 300 topics. We discuss in detail the interpretation of the results discovered by the system including specific topic and author models, ranking of authors by topic and topics by author, significant trends in the computer science literature between 1990 and 2002, parsing of abstracts by topics and authors and detection of unusual papers by specific authors. An online query interface to the model is also discussed that allows interactive exploration of author-topic models for corpora such as CiteSeer. Given a set of images containing multiple object categories, we seek to discover those categories and their image locations without supervision. We achieve this using generative models from the statistical text literature: probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (pLSA), and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). In text analysis these are used to discover topics in a corpus using the bag-of-words document representation. Here we discover topics as object categories, so that an image containing instances of several categories is modelled as a mixture of topics. The models are applied to images by using a visual analogue of a word, formed by vector quantizing SIFT like region descriptors. We investigate a set of increasingly demanding scenarios, starting with image sets containing only two object categories through to sets containing multiple categories (including airplanes, cars, faces, motorbikes, spotted cats) and background clutter. The object categories sample both intra-class and scale variation, and both the categories and their approximate spatial layout are found without supervision. We also demonstrate classification of unseen images and images containing multiple objects. Performance of the proposed unsupervised method is compared to the semi-supervised approach of [7].1 1This work was sponsored in part by the EU Project CogViSys, the University of Oxford, Shell Oil, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The exploration and analysis of scientific literature collections is an important task for effective knowledge management. Past interest in such document sets has spurred the development of numerous visualization approaches for their interactive analysis. They either focus on the textual content of publications, or on document metadata including authors and citations. Previously presented approaches for citation analysis aim primarily at the visualization of the structure of citation networks and their exploration. We extend the state-of-the-art by presenting an approach for the interactive visual analysis of the contents of scientific documents, and combine it with a new and flexible technique to analyze their citations. This technique facilitates user-steered aggregation of citations which are linked to the content of the citing publications using a highly interactive visualization approach. Through enriching the approach with additional interactive views of other important aspects of the data, we support the exploration of the dataset over time and enable users to analyze citation patterns, spot trends, and track long-term developments. We demonstrate the strengths of our approach through a use case and discuss it based on expert user feedback. Interactive visualization provides valuable support for exploring, analyzing, and understanding textual documents. Certain tasks, however, require that insights derived from visual abstractions are verified by a human expert perusing the source text. So far, this problem is typically solved by offering overview-detail techniques, which present different views with different levels of abstractions. This often leads to problems with visual continuity. Focus-context techniques, on the other hand, succeed in accentuating interesting subsections of large text documents but are normally not suited for integrating visual abstractions. With VarifocalReader we present a technique that helps to solve some of these approaches' problems by combining characteristics from both. In particular, our method simplifies working with large and potentially complex text documents by simultaneously offering abstract representations of varying detail, based on the inherent structure of the document, and access to the text itself. In addition, VarifocalReader supports intra-document exploration through advanced navigation concepts and facilitates visual analysis tasks. The approach enables users to apply machine learning techniques and search mechanisms as well as to assess and adapt these techniques. This helps to extract entities, concepts and other artifacts from texts. In combination with the automatic generation of intermediate text levels through topic segmentation for thematic orientation, users can test hypotheses or develop interesting new research questions. To illustrate the advantages of our approach, we provide usage examples from literature studies.