Understanding Collections and Their Implicit Structures through Information Visualization

This chapter discusses how various approaches to information visualization can be used to assist users in understanding large digital collections and discovering relationships among the entities involved explicitly or implicitly in their development including people, organizations, and documents. Our main postulate is that visualization schemes, such as fisheye views, starfield displays, or self-organizing maps, when integrated and coupled with semantic layouts of topic areas, can significantly facilitate the analysis and discovery of existing and potential relationships among a wide range of entities. A series of developments illustrates how users play a key role in determining advantages and limitations of information visualization schemes, as well as in finding opportunities for improvement and new application areas.