HCI Portfolio / InfoWater
InfoWater is a proposed system for exploring conference papers. It was completed for the InfoVis 2004 conference, and specifically tries to visualize the progression of conference paper topics over time and the relationships between and importance of individual authors and papers. Our team of 5 combined a technique called the "theme river" to display how the popularity of different topics had shifted over time. This module was implemented in JAVA Swing, and is shown below:
You can immediately see the spike in submissions to this conference in the past several years, as well as some topics which had brief spikes of popularity only to fade out quickly.
Users could examine topics in more detail by dragging them out of the river into the main workspace, which presents topics as "Puddles". These display the papers and authors who have contributed to the topic of the years. The size of each document / author relates to their importance, calculated based on references and number of papers written. We also show connections between the items, for authors these are co-authorships and for papers they represent references. The objects are laid out using a spring tension diagram, so closely related objects, such as a group of research assistants and their professor, are spaced close together, as seen below.
You can read more details about this project at: