Integrating Interactive Visualizations in the Search Process of Digital Libraries and IR Systems
This work addresses the problem of limited exploration and retrieval support in digital libraries for users, but it is incremental as it applies existing visualization techniques to a specific domain.
The paper tackled the lack of interactive visualizations in digital libraries and IR systems by integrating a set of interactive graphics into a real-world social science digital library, resulting in users gaining intuitive insights and adopting interaction techniques as verified in a user study.
Interactive visualizations for exploring and retrieval have not yet become an integral part of digital libraries and information retrieval systems. We have integrated a set of interactive graphics in a real world social science digital library. These visualizations support the exploration of search queries, results and authors, can filter search results, show trends in the database and can support the creation of new search queries. The use of weighted brushing supports the identification of related metadata for search facets. We discuss some use cases of the combination of IR systems and interactive graphics. In a user study we verify that users can gain insights from statistical graphics intuitively and can adopt interaction techniques.