Download the Thesis here

Read it in ResearchGate

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Information and Communication - University of Barcelona (2015)

Visualization and exploration of texts.
A theoretical framework and two practical approaches for improvement of digital libraries and information retrieval systems.

Cover of the thesis

Screenshot cover detail

by Jaume Nualart Vilaplana
(University of Barcelona)

ABSTRACT
This research project aims to improve the way humans work with textual documents when doing tasks such as exploring, discovering, searching, filtering, collecting, indexing, comparing, or just reading. This research project studies theoretical foundations and practical uses of text visualization techniques. As a contribution to theory, the research project presents a classification schema for text visualization approaches based on visual features instead of task-solving capabilities (Paper I). As a contribution to practice, how to improve interfaces of digital libraries (DL) has been studied. Two practical proposals for approaching text are introduced: one for single text representation, called Texty (Paper II), and another for text collections exploration and overview, called Area (Paper III). This research project discusses the contrast between the growing popularity of text visualization, presented as a subfield of data visualization, and the lack and urgency, nowadays, of interactive and visual interfaces to DL