Interactive Multimedia Technology: RENCI Visualization Center Update & Link to Innovative Interactivity post

Feb 9, 2010

RENCI Visualization Center Update & Link to Innovative Interactivity post

I've been meaning to visit a few of North Carolina's RENCI visualization centers, but I just haven't had a moment to squeeze the field trip in my schedule. Tracy Boyer, who authors the Innovative Interactivity blog, had a chance to visit the center in Chapel Hill

For those of you who can't visit a RENCI center, visit Tracy's blog and read about her first-hand experience as a visitor: RENCI pioneering the visualization industry with innovative interfaces
I found a link to the following project, "The Docuverse", deep within one of the RENCI websites:

The Docuverse: 1.5 million documents on the screen at once.

"The Docuverse is a method of displaying an entire digital library on a screen at once. The Docuverse takes a digital library of HTML documents and a set of queries and creates a “universe” around these queries. Each “galaxy” corresponds to a library query. Each “star” corresponds to a document. The most relevant documents found through a query are the stars located close to the center of a galaxy. Documents perceived by a search engine as less relevant are out among the arms of the galaxies. The visualization is interactive, allowing the user to zoom in and out of galaxies, change queries, and overlay different kinds of data mining results onto the visualization to show how documents with certain characteristics are distributed throughout the collection."