Linear-time diagram: A set visualisation technique for personal visualisation to understand social interactions over time

Abstract

With the advent of pervasive social networks and social communication media, people are connected all the time and messages arrive endlessly on their devices, generating an enormous quantity of personal content, such as: textual messages, photos, audio clips and videos. However, when an individual desires to go back in the time, recalling or reflecting on what happened months ago about his/her conversation with friends, he/she needs to continuously frenzy scroll over all the past messages and so far there is no visualisation support that can help in recalling personal chats. This work contributes in the emerging field of the Personal Visual Analytics, introducing the Linear-time diagrams, a combination of linear diagram along with a time line, to easily identify “who interacted with whom and what topic” in a particular period of time. Since, there are no specific tools to visualise and represent set relationships (friendships through messages) over time, but there are many well-known set visualisation tools (without time consideration), such as Euler diagrams, Venn diagrams, Linear diagrams, Spherule diagrams etc. This paper merges Linear diagrams for their scalability in representing set relationships and time-series to represent sequence of events occurred over a period of time to glint the novelty. A prototype tool has been developed, using an anonymous Facebook chat log from the wild. We conducted a workshop with social media users to gain insights about the existing social media without visualisation support and how our visualisation aims in supporting it. The outcomes of the preliminary workshop will help us in enhancing the tool with user-interactions and also consider gestalt principles, perceptual and cognitive theories to navigate easily, analyse and interpret data efficiently.