2nd View was not Helpful

[JacobMoore]

In solving the Atlantic Storm dataset, I did not find the second view (following connected biclusters) helpful at all. There were a number of issues I ran into. The first view helped identify key items that were central to the plot, but exploring the connections was easier with the documents themselves. Here are some reasons.

1. The most related biclusters did not necessarily add new information. It might be part of the original social circle plus the word "FBI" which is just because of the documents. I seemed to be stuck revisiting the same information over and over again when following the tool. There was no sense of following a story, I could only do that with the documents. This is more related to biclusters as a tool than it is to our visualization as a tool.
2. In a related note, entities such as "FBI" which are of no practical relevance dominated the visualizations. Some way to eliminate entities as important connections would be helpful.
3. There was no way to explore in the 2nd view. You can select other nodes but that does not bring them to the center.
4. There was no good way in the second view to tell which entities belonged to which bicluster. They were just lumped together in one bicluster.

[ankit]

1 - Any other ideas on how we could make the second view better?

• Do you think ability to bookmark/save biclusters for later reference will be useful?
• Or maybe a history of each bicluster you have explored in a session? There could be a History Link which pops up all the previous biclusters you have explored. You can then select one to explore a bicluster again.

2 - might be a lower priority though (not sure). Makes sense to be able to reduce the noise.

3 - makes sense i think

4 - Do you care which bicluster the entities belong to? As a user, aren't you mostly concerned about the relationships between entities, rather than identifying them with their biclusters?

Thanks for the feedback! Very useful!

[JacobMoore]

1. I think the ability to bookmark biclusters could be useful, but we need to solve other problems first. I wasn't finding anything I could string together as a story so I had no desire to bookmark things. I was also using paper and the documents a lot so that is where I did most of my history and stringing things together. I think the history is a low priority.
2. I think this is important, though I'm not sure how feasible it is. The terms "FBI", "CIA" and "NSA" seemed to link everything together and gave a lot of false positives in terms of groups. These were just the agencies that gathered the intelligence. If we could get rid of these elements, I think the data would be a lot sparcer and a lot more helpful.
3. No additional comment
4. I had trouble telling what were the new elements when hovering around, particularly for smaller biclusters. If I focus on a big bicluster to start with, that dominates the display. I wanted to know what the other biclusters added to the elements.

[JacobMoore]

In terms of being able to make a story from the data, I'm not sure how feasible it is with biclusters now. The story had some tenuous connections that were still very important. I don't know of a way to filter these important but small connections from the unimportant and small connections other than reading the documents themselves.

We may need to just leave the story telling up to the user. Our tool is helpful for searching. Maybe we instead focus the second view on being a single search. Enter an element and the tool displays all biclusters that contain that element? Along with a list of all the elements in these biclusters? Its a big change for late in the project though.

[ankit]

I think the most you can do with biclusters is to come up with a group of entities you think are related and the most important. You still need textual content for knowing the relationships between these entities. That's why JigSaw was useful, it had a Documents View. We don't have access to the textual content, and I think developing a tool that links to the textual content is out of scope for a term project. Plus, we didn't get access to any text anyways in the first place.

I think we can keep the second view. I am building the ability to search biclusters based on entity name.

About the 4th point in your earlier comment, it's a double edged sword. You're right we're losing some data there, maybe highlight the newly added entities in some way, instead of highlighting the common ones.