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The present research analyses the 'social visualization' tool Sense.us, a commercial interactive Web application in which U.S. Census data are visualized. Sense.us was developed as a tool for social data exploration and interaction, in which it would be worthwhile to pay attention to the socio-cultural values that have driven the collection and categorization of the underlying U.S. Census datasets. It is argued that closer attention to value driven U.S. Census statistics would greatly enhance the social appeal of Sense.us, and would be a logical next step in the development of online social visualization tools. In order to allow for explicit socio-cultural values of statistics in online visualizations, three strategies are offered: pro-active annotation; more attention to visual aesthetics; and, a tighter integration of user profiles and represented data.

In the process of knowledge discovery, workers examine available information in order to make sense of it. By sensemaking, we mean interacting with and operating on the information with a variety of information processing mechanisms [3,18]. Previously, we introduced a concept that uses the spreadsheet metaphor with cells containing visualizations of complex data. In this paper, we extend and apply a cognitive model called "visual sensemaking " to the Visualization Spreadsheet. We use the task of making sense of a large Web site as a concrete example through out the paper for demonstration. Using a variety of visualization techniques, such as the Disk Tree and Cone Tree, we show that the interactions of the Visualization Spreadsheet help users draw conclusions from the overall relationships of the entire information set.

Jigsaw provides a collection of visualizations that each portray different aspects of the documents. We particularly focus on presenting the identifiable important entities (people, places, organizations, etc.) and their direct or indirect connections. Textual processing extracts the important entities from the documents and then the visualizations help an analyst to explore the relationships and connections among the entities. The system includes graph, calendar, scatterplot and and tabular connections-based views, as well as views of individual document's text and the report collections as a whole. Jigsaw essentially acts as a visual index onto the document collection, helping analysts identify particular documents to read and examine next.

This is a resource page for CCL's Visual Explorer™ with descriptions of the tool and its multiple uses for creative conversations and dialogue. VE™ supports strategy making, visioning, culture transformation, creative problem solving, coaching, classroom facilitation, teambuilding, visual sensemaking, resolving complex challenges, and leadership development.

TagCrowd is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any user-supplied text by creating what is popularly known as a tag cloud or text cloud. TagCrowd is taking tag clouds far beyond their original function: * as topic summaries for speeches and written works * as blog tool or website analysis for search engine optimization (SEO) * for visual analysis of survey data * as brand clouds that let companies see how they are perceived by the world * for data mining a text corpus * for helping writers and students reflect on their work * as name tags for conferences, cocktail parties or wherever new collaborations start * as resumes in a single glance * as visual poetry

GUESS is an exploratory data analysis and visualization tool for graphs and networks. The system contains a domain-specific embedded language called Gython (an extension of Python, or more specifically Jython) which supports the operators and syntactic sugar necessary for working on graph structures in an intuitive manner. An interactive interpreter binds the text that you type in the interpreter to the objects being visualized for more useful integration. GUESS also offers a visualization front end that supports the export of static images and dynamic movies.

Using segments of rich media makes it possible to aggregate context and meaning on these chunks by using a number of different mechanisms. Starting with a granular node -- be it a sound bite, visual clip or written fact -- it is possible to aggregate contextual metadata through a series of steps that emergently progress from: * Starting with thousands of defined Audio Sound Bites & visual clips * Rating sound bites and clustering them with folksonomy tags * Sequencing audio sound bites within playlists * Collaboratively building larger sequences with nested playlists * Independently controlling the video & audio tracks with 2-dimensional nested playlists * Evaluating Multiple Storylines and Hypotheses with a 2-dimensional playlist matrix * Visualizing complex networks by mapping out feedback loop relationships between nodes

VE can be used in a wide variety of ways depending on the context. Here are the five basic steps for using VE to facilitate a group conversation around a shared question. These steps can be altered or elaborated for particular situations as described in the VE Guidebook. 1. Frame 2. Browse 3. Reflect 4. Share 5. Extend

The JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit provides tools for creating Interactive Data Visualizations for the Web.

Cytoscape is an open source bioinformatics software platform for visualizing molecular interaction networks and integrating these interactions with gene expression profiles and other state data.

MindCanvas is a online research service to gather insights about your customers' thoughts & feelings. Online surveys require users to complete boring html forms. You can use our Game-like Elicitation Methods (GEMs) to gather user feedback. At the end of the study, you can use our Visual Analysis Engine to order rich visualizations of your data.

The Web is ephemeral. Pages change frequently, and it is nearly impossible to find data or follow a link after the underlying page evolves. We present Zoetrope, a system that enables interaction with the historical Web (pages, links, and embedded data) that would otherwise be lost to time. Using a number of novel interactions, the temporal Web can be manipulated, queried, and analyzed from the context of familar pages. Zoetrope is based on a set of operators for manipulating content streams. We describe these primitives and the associated indexing strategies for handling temporal Web data. They form the basis of Zoetrope and enable our construction of new temporal interactions and visualizations.

TagMaps is a toolkit to visualize text (well, tags) geographically on a map.

Longwell mixes the flexibility of the RDF data model with the effectiveness of the faceted browsing UI paradigm and enables you to visualize and browse any arbitrarely complex RDF dataset, allowing you to build a user-friendly web site out of your data within minutes and without requiring any code at all.

Cytoscape is an open source bioinformatics software platform for visualizing molecular interaction networks and integrating these interactions with gene expression profiles and other state data.

Media Cloud is a system that lets you see the flow of the media. The Internet is fundamentally altering the way that news is produced and distributed, but there are few comprehensive approaches to understanding the nature of these changes. Media Cloud automatically builds an archive of news stories and blog posts from the web, applies language processing, and gives you ways to analyze and visualize the data.

Picturing to Learn (PtL) is founded on the following core premises: one From a student's perspective: undergraduate students can clarify their own understanding of scientific concepts and processes by creating drawings that explain these concepts to non-experts. two From a teacher's perspective: drawings can be useful as: * assessment tools, allowing instructors to identify students' scientific understanding and pinpoint their misconceptions * educational tools, to help inform instructors' lecture preparation

The Distributed Annotation System (DAS) defines a communication protocol used to exchange biological annotations. It is motivated by the idea that such annotations should not be provided by single centralized databases, but should instead be spread over multiple sites. Data distribution, performed by DAS servers, is separated from visualization, which is done by DAS clients. DAS is a client-server system in which a single client integrates information from multiple servers. It allows a single machine to gather up sequence annotation information from multiple distant web sites, collate the information, and display it to the user in a single view. Little coordination is needed among the various information providers. DAS is heavily used in the genome bioinformatics community. Over the last years we have also seen growing acceptance in the protein sequence and structure communities.

This paper is based on a study of personal experience narratives told by witnesses of the September 11th attacks in calls to C-SPAN. Drawing on research on narratives of ordinary and extraordinary experiences and witnessing, the author offers a framework for analyzing the structure and function of eyewitness accounts. Analysis focuses on methods callers use to show and tell the audience where they were, what they were doing, and what they were thinking at the time of the attacks. Verbal, visual, and structural features of these narratives are highlighted, with particular attention given to orientation and ideation components of the narratives. The design of these components and their location within the callers' stories are shown to construct the narratives as eyewitness accounts, position the callers and audience members as witnesses, and engage all in a therapeutic sensemaking process.

understanding this content and making decisions based on it (especially in mission-critical situations) is not just a simple matter of consuming information. To effectively "make sense" of large, heterogeneous, and often unstructured content collections requires: - efficient, accurate, and context-based ways of extracting, filtering, and summarizing information; - better and more meaningful ways of organizing, visualizing, and interacting with the information; - faster, more objective methods for investigating hypotheses, detecting trends or patterns across multiple sources, and otherwise analyzing or interpreting information.