A visual analytic framework for exploring relationships in textual contents of digital forensics evidence

We describe the development of a set of tools for analyzing the textual contents of digital forensic evidence for the purpose of enhancing an investigator's ability to discover information quickly and efficiently. By examining the textual contents of files and unallocated space, relationships between sets of files and clusters can be formed based on the information that they contain. Using the information gathered from the evidence through the analysis tool, the visualization tool can be used to search through the evidence in an organized and efficient manner. The visualization depicts both the frequency of relevant terms and their location on disk. We also discuss a task analysis with forensics officers to motivate the design.