Visualizing Live Text Streams Using Motion and Temporal Pooling

In today's fast-paced world, it is increasingly difficult to understand and act promptly upon the content of the many information streams available. Temporal pooling addresses this problem by producing a visual summary of recent stream content. This summary is often in motion to incorporate newly arrived content and to stay up-to-date. We therefore review the perception of motion and change blindness, offering several guidelines for the use of motion in visualization. We then describe TextPool, a tool for visualizing live text streams such as newswires, blogs and closed captioning. TextPool's temporal pooling summarization is a dynamic textual collage that clusters related terms. We tested TextPool with the content of several RSS newswire feeds, streaming 800 stories per day. TextPool was able to handle this bandwidth well, producing useful summarizations of stream content. We then examine TextPool in the light of our guidelines, and speculate on other possible implementatio...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2005
• Where: CGA
• Authors: Conrad Albrecht-Buehler, Benjamin Watson, David A. Shamma
• Keywords: CGA 2005, Computational Geometry, Stream Content, Temporal Pooling, Temporal Pooling Addresses