TwitterScope gets best paper at GD by David Eppstein.
From the post:
This year’s Graph Drawing Symposium is coming up in less than two weeks, and has already announced the winners of the best paper awards in each of the two submission tracks, “combinatorial and algorithmic aspects” and “visualization systems and interfaces”. The winner in the theory track was my paper on Lombardi drawing, but I already posted here about that, so instead I wanted to say some more about the other winner, “Visualizing Streaming Text Data with Dynamic Graphs and Maps” by Emden Gansner, Yifan Hu, and Stephen North. A preprint version of their paper is online at arXiv:1206.3980.
The paper describes the TwitterScope project, which provides visualization tools for high-volume streams of text data (e.g. from Twitter). Currently it exists as a publicly viewable prototype, set up to choose among nine preselected topics. Recent tweets are shown as small icons, grouped into colored regions (representing subtopics) within what looks like a map. Hovering the mouse over an icon shows the corresponding tweet. It’s updated dynamically as new tweets come in, and has a timeline for viewing past tweets. My feeling from the description is that the work involved in putting this system together was less about coming up with new technical methods for visualization (although there is some of that there, particularly in how they handle disconnected graphs) and more about making a selection among many different ideas previously seen in this area and putting them together into a single coherent and well-engineered system. Which I guess should be what that track is all about.
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My musings on the same paper: Visualizing Streaming Text Data with Dynamic Maps.