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Summary
Investigative analysts acquire clues and connect small bits of
evidence to uncover larger plans, stories, or narratives. Often, the
individual bits of evidence are short text documents, and analysts
must examine large collections of such documents in order to "put the
pieces together" and formulate a well-supported hypothesis about
actions that may occur in the future. As the number of documents to
examine rises, it becomes more and more challenging for analysts to
uncover the embedded plans.
We are creating Jigsaw, a visual analytics system to help analysts
better assess, analyze, and make sense of such document collections.
Our specific objective is to help analysts reach more timely and
accurate understandings of the plot(s) embedded throughout textual
reports. Jigsaw provides a collection of visualizations that each
portray different aspects of the documents. We particularly focus on
presenting the identifiable important entities (people, places,
organizations, etc.) and their direct or indirect connections. Textual
processing extracts the important entities from the documents and then
the visualizations help an analyst to explore the relationships and
connections among the entities. The system includes graph, calendar,
scatterplot and and tabular connections-based views, as well as views
of individual document's text and the report collections as a whole.
Jigsaw essentially acts as a visual index onto the document
collection, helping analysts identify particular documents to read and
examine next.
For a good, short (2-page) overview of Jigsaw's goals and methods,
please see the Spring 2008 VacViews
article about the system.
To learn more about the system's details and its different
visualizations, please examine the Jigsaw views
page.
Using Jigsaw as an analytic aid, we entered and won the university
division of the VAST 2007
Contest. To learn more about our contest entry, visit the Contest Summary page.
We presented a full paper about Jigsaw at the VAST 2007 Symposium and
an extended version of that paper in the Information
Visualization journal in 2008.
Two short papers also appearing in the VAST 2007 proceedings describe
our experiences working on the
contest. Furthermore, a video illustrating system capabilities is
available as well (links to the video and papers appear above). Please
contact Professor Stasko if you would like more information about the system.
The picture below shows Jigsaw being used on a computer with four monitors
presenting the different system views. The multitude of views in the
system makes a mutliple monitor computer like this desirable for analysis.
Below is a picture of our team member Leo discussing the Jigsaw
project at the DHS Summit in Washington D.C. in March 2007.
This research is supported by a grant from
the Dept. of Homeland Security's NVAC
Program and is one of a number of projects from the Southeastern Regional Visualization
and Analytics Center.
Last
modified: October 24, 2008 |
Projects
Using Jigsaw, we won
the university division of the VAST 2007
Contest 
