Information visualizations must allow users to browse information spaces and focus quickly on items of interest. Being able to see some representation of the entire information space provides an initial gestalt overview and gives context to support browsing and search tasks. However, the limited number of pixels on the screen constrain the information bandwidth and make it difficult to completely display large information spaces. The Information Mural is a two-dimensional, reduced representation of an entire information space that fits entirely within a display window or screen. The mural creates a miniature version of the information space using visual attributes such as grayscale shading, intensity, color, and pixel size, along with anti-aliased compression techniques. Information Murals can be used as stand-alone visualizations or in global navigational views. We have built several prototypes to demonstrate the use of Information Murals in visualization applications; subject matter ...

Previous examinations of search in textual archives have assumed that users first retrieve a ranked set of documents relevant to their query, and then visually scan through these documents, to identify the information they seek. While document scanning is possible in text, it is much more laborious in speech archives, due to the inherently serial nature of speech. Yet, in developing tools for speech access, little attention has so far been paid to users' problems in scanning and extracting information from within "speech documents". We demonstrate the extent of these problems in two user studies. We show that users experience severe problems with local navigation in extracting relevant information from within "speech documents". Based on these results, we propose a new user interface (UI) design paradigm: What You See Is (Almost) What You Hear, (WYSIAWYH) - a multimodal method for accessing speech archives. This paradigm presents a visual analogue to the underlying speech, enabling vi...

Commercial interfaces for accessing digital speech data are based on ‘tape recorder ’ metaphors. However, such interfaces make it highly laborious to access complex speech data. The absence of effective interfaces is a major obstacle to exploiting the increasing number of speech archives now available online. More novel research interfaces provide potentially more effective access by presenting visual or textual indices into the underlying speech data. The current experimental study evaluates the utility of these newer techniques compared with a ‘tape recorder ’ interface. We compare: (a) High-level Visual Overviews showing the distribution and density of user query terms; (b) Textual Transcripts generated using state of the art ASR; (c) a tape recorder baseline. Laboratory tests showed that, contrary to our expectations, high-level visual information proved more useful than textual information, although both perform better than a tape-recorder baseline. Visual overviews enable users to quickly identify relevant regions to be played. In contrast, Textual transcripts can mislead users who try to extract detailed information solely by reading the transcript, without listening to the underlying speech.

Despite the recent growth and potential utility of speech archives, we currently lack tools for effective archival access. Previous research on search of textual archives has assumed that the system goal should be to retrieve sets of relevant documents, leaving users to visually scan through those documents to identify relevant information. However, in previous work we show that in accessing real speech archives, it is insufficient to only retrieve "document" sets [9,10]. Users experience huge problems of local navigation in attempting to extract relevant information from within speech "documents". These studies also show that users address these problems by taking handwritten notes. These notes detail both the content of the speech and serve as indices to help access relevant regions of the archive. From these studies we derive a new principle for the design of speech access systems: What You See Is (Almost) What You Hear. We present a new user interface to a broadcast news archive, d...

Information visualizations must allow users to browse information spaces and focus quickly on items of interest. Being able to see some representation of the entire information space provides an initial gestalt overview and gives context to support browsing and search tasks. However, the limited number of pixels on the screen constrain the information bandwidth and make it difficult to completely display large information spaces. The Information Mural is a two-dimensional, reduced representation of an entire information space that fits entirely within a display window or screen. The mural creates a miniature version of the information space using visual attributes such as grayscale shading, intensity, color, and pixel size, along with anti-aliased compression techniques. Information Murals can be used as stand-alone visualizations or in global navigational views. We have built several prototypes to demonstrate the use of Information Murals in visualization applications; subject matter ...

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This paper will present a new visual information retrieval system for metadata and the interaction techniques of the new system. The abundance of information we get while analyzing search results of an arbitrary query has to be channeled. This can be done by different visualizations and filter techniques. We use a Scatterplot in combination with a so called SuperTable to support the process of finding relevant information in an intuitive yet multifunctional way. Visual filters and the interaction between the visualizations play an important role. By examples from a web and a movie database search features are demonstrated.