HisVA: A Visual Analytics System for Studying History
This system addresses the challenge for history students and instructors in exploring historical events more spontaneously and broadly, though it is incremental as it builds on existing visual analytics and data sources.
The authors tackled the problem of inefficient and narrow historical study by developing HisVA, a visual analytics system that enables exploration of historical events from Wikipedia through event, map, and resource views, with evaluation showing effective user exploration strategies and positive expert feedback.
Studying history involves many difficult tasks. Examples include searching for proper data in a large event space, understanding stories of historical events by time and space, and finding relationships among events that may not be apparent. Instructors who extensively use well-organized and well-argued materials (e.g., textbooks and online resources) can lead students to a narrow perspective in understanding history and prevent spontaneous investigation of historical events, with the students asking their own questions. In this work, we proposed HisVA, a visual analytics system that allows the efficient exploration of historical events from Wikipedia using three views: event, map, and resource. HisVA provides an effective event exploration space, where users can investigate relationships among historical events by reviewing and linking them in terms of space and time. To evaluate our system, we present two usage scenarios, a user study with a qualitative analysis of user exploration strategies, and %expert feedback with in-class deployment results.