Temporal Visualization using Physics based Dynamic Tag clouds

Abstract

A word cloud is a visual representation of a collection of text documents that uses various font sizes and colors to depict signi?cant words The majority of previous studies on time-varying word clouds focuses on layout optimization and temporal trend visualization However they do not fully consider the temporal motions temporal coherence and spatial shapes of word clouds which are important cues for human visual systems in capturing information from time-varying text data This paper presents a novel method that uses rigid body dynamics to arrange multi-temporal word tags in a speci?c shape sequence under various constraints Each word tag is regarded as a rigid body in dynamics With the aid of geometric aesthetic and temporal coherence constraints the proposed method can generate a temporally morphable word cloud that not only arranges word tags in their corresponding shapesbut also smoothly transforms the shapes of word clouds over time thus yielding a pleasing time-varying visualization The generated word-cloud morphing can be an effective storytelling and visualization tool that illustrates the temporal changes in both the word tags and the shapes of the word clouds Experiment results on various data demonstrate the feasibility and ?exibility of the proposed method in morphable word cloud generation

Date of Award	2014 Aug 6
Original language	English
Supervisor	Tong-Yee Lee (Supervisor)