Tag clouds with a twist: using tag clouds coloured by information’s trustworthiness to support situational awareness

Abstract

The amount and variety of information currently available online is astounding. Information can be found covering any subject and is accessible from any part of the globe. While this is beneficial for countless purposes, whether they be in understanding situations or for making decisions, the sheer amount of information has led to significant problems in information overload. As humans, we are simply unable to consume, reason about, and act on such a vast quantity of information in a timely manner. This is especially true in cases where gathering a quick understanding or awareness of a situation is desirable, or even required. In this article, therefore, we aim to investigate an approach to helping address this problem, which builds on our previous research in the area of assessing and presenting the trustworthiness of online information. Specifically, this article examines the capability of tag (or word) clouds, coloured according to the trustworthiness of the contexts in which they appear, in supporting an individual's understanding of a situation. The novelty of this work is in the application of such tag clouds to a new decision-making context, and engaging in a critical, user-based assessment of their use. To comment briefly on our findings, we note that there is potentially a significant value to be gained in the application of this technique, in providing a quick, helpful and accurate overview of a situation. This could be exploited by the public at large, but possibly even in more official investigative or crisis-management scenarios.

A survey of tag clouds as tools for information retrieval and content representation

“…Currently, a large number of authors continue researching different aspects of tag clouds as well as using them in their research, 4,18–21 and also developing software for word cloud generation. 22,23…”

Using semantic clustering to support situation awareness on Twitter: the case of world views

“…A tag cloud, or word cloud, is a visualisation technique for textual data, where size, colour, and positioning are used to indicate characteristics (such as frequency and prominence) of the words. Tag clouds are often used to display summaries of large amounts of text, especially with regard to providing a quick perspective of a situation [13]. In our approach, we use tag clouds as the primary visualisation mechanism to display world views as output from our SVOSSTC approach.…”

“…Here, letters within words were coloured according to the trustworthiness of the contexts in which they appear, with green being the most trustworthy and red the least. From our experimentation with this visualisation approach, we were able to show that it is useful in decision-making, particularly in facilitating a quick, helpful, and accurate overview of a situation [13].…”

“…A main research challenge that we seek to tackle here is the creation of a novel system that can understand data through the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, and determine consistent and corroborated information items. This work is intended to complement our existing efforts of building a suite of tools for individuals and organisations that can allow actionable intelligence to be gained from open source information [10,11,12,13]. These tools would be tailored for analysis of online content while also possessing interfaces suited for human cognition.…”