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We describe four usability-enhancing interfaces to CITIDEL aimed at improving the user experience and supporting personalized information access by targeted communities. These comprise: a multimodal interaction facility with capability for out-of-turn input, interactive visualizations for exploratory analysis, a translation center exposing multilingual interfaces, as well as traditional usability enhancements. Pilot studies demonstrate the resulting improvements in quality, as measured across a number of metrics. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User

Abstract. The Digital Library (DL) field is one of the most promising areas of application for information visualization technology. In this paper, we propose a visual user interface tool kit for digital libraries, to deliver an overview of document sets, with support for interactive direct manipulation. Our system, Citiviz, employs a dynamic hyperbolic tree to display hierarchical relationships among documents, based on where their topics fit into the ACM classification system. Also, Citiviz provides an interactive, animated 2-dimensional scatter plot. With it, users may gain insight by changing various parameters, or may directly jump to a particular document based on its label or location. According to a preliminary evaluation, our system shows advantages in performance and user preference relative to traditional text based DL web interfaces.

Research in several areas provides scientific guidance for use of graphical encoding to convey information in an information visualization display. By graphical encoding we mean the use of visual display elements such as icon color, shape, size, or position to convey information about objects represented by the icons. Literature offers inconclusive and often conflicting viewpoints, including the suggestion that the effectiveness of a graphical encoding depends on the type of data represented. Our empirical study suggests that the nature of the users ’ perceptual task is more indicative of the effectiveness of a graphical encoding than the type of data represented. 1. Overview of Perceptual Issues In producing a design to visualize search results for a

To enhance the ENVISION interface and facilitate user interaction, various techniques were considered for better rendering of search results with improved scalability. In this paper we discuss the challenges we encountered and our solutions to those problems.

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The authors are developing a digital library to help during the long-term recovery from the mass shooting on April 16, 2007 at Virginia Tech. Content comes from uploaded texts, images, videos, and other files, as well as pages crawled from the Web and information collected, with permission, from those working with Web 2.0 sites such as Facebook and Flickr. The authors are applying data/text mining, social network analysis, and information visualization methods to facilitate systems science, providing key added-value services, especially to social and behavioral scientists seeking faster and easier ways to analyze, model, understand, and test hypotheses. The article also considers how technologies influence communications. The authors aim to support the university, local community, region, nation, and the world, as it seeks to learn from a