visualizing large data sets

In the real world we continuously, though often peripherally, observe the social patterns around us. At a conference, for instance, we notice groups of people who always appear together: students whose common bond we recognize because of their shared sartorial eccentricities, groups of suited salesmen amidst a sea of t-shirt clad researchers. Such observations help us to make sense of the complex social world we live in. Similar patterns exist in the virtual world, whether it be communities of people in an online service, the employees of global corporation, or the electronically registered participants in a conference. Yet in the virtual world, such patterns are usually invisible, hidden within vast databases; they can be seen only if explicitly visualized. Visual Who depicts these social patterns and recreates – though in a very different way – the fascination we have with people watching in real life.

Visual Who is a tool for visualizing the complex relationships among a large group of items where each item is characterized by a set of attributes drawn from a large pool of possible attributes.Visual Who can be used to investigate a wide range of datasets. Our focus is on its social use -- as a way for members of a community to explore and come to understand the roles, ideas and histories that bring them together. Users choose anchors, each representing a topic relevant to the community, and place them on the screen. As they do so, the names of the community members rearrange themselves, showing who is especially drawn to certain ideas and which members share similar sets of interests.

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Although constructed for researchers to share news and information, Usenet quickly developed into a social environment with varied styles of interactions. Unfortunately, the browsers developed to view the shared messages fail to effectively convey the rich social features of a newsgroup, let alone all of Usenet. The goal of this research is to use the salient features of social interaction to build a "legible" interactive visual representation of Usenet.

We started by exploring the Usenet environment, constructing a series of relevant questions. From the questions, we have started to explore how this information can be derived from the textual data available online. Simultaneously, we have started designing segments of a visualization, under the assumption that the desired characteristics were ascertainable. To build our designs, we draw on a wide variety of theoretical and practical concepts from a range of fields, including graphic and interactive design, architecture, sociology, and computer animation.