Menu Close

Exploring Text Entities with Descriptive Non-photorealistic Rendering

Contributors:

Daniel Chang and Christopher Collins

We present a novel approach to text visualization called descriptive non-photorealistic rendering which exploits the inherent spatial and abstract dimensions in text documents to integrate 3D non-photorealistic rendering with information visualization.  The visualization encodes text data onto 3D models, emphasizing the relative significance of words in the text and the physical, real-world relationships between those words. Analytic exploration is supported through a collection of interactive widgets and direct multitouch interaction with the 3D models.  We applied our method to analyze a collection of vehicle complaint reports from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and through a qualitative evaluation study, we demonstrate how our system can support tasks such as comparing the reliability of different makes and models, finding interesting facts, and revealing possible causal relations between car parts.

Publications

  • M. Chang and C. Collins, “Exploring Entities in Text with Descriptive Non-photorealistic Rendering,” in Proc. of the 2013 IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium (PACIFICVIS ’13), 2013.

    PDF

    @InProceedings{cha2013a,
    author = {Meng-Wei Chang and Christopher Collins},
    title = {Exploring Entities in Text with Descriptive Non-photorealistic Rendering},
    booktitle = {Proc. of the 2013 IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium (PACIFICVIS ’13)},
    year = 2013
    }

  • M. Chang, “Exploring Entities in Text with Descriptive Non-photorealistic Rendering,” Master Thesis, 2012.

    PDF

    @MastersThesis{cha2012a,
    author = {Meng-Wei Chang},
    title = {Exploring Entities in Text with Descriptive Non-photorealistic Rendering},
    school = {University of Ontario Institute of Technology},
    year = 2012
    }

Acknowledgements