Visualizing live text streams using motion and temporal pooling

The informational context in which we live and work is becoming increasingly complex and rich, with information much more plentiful and accessible than ever before. Our informational context is also faster paced, with news and developments spreading across media and the Internet at an often astounding rate. In today's competitive world, the first response to a trend is usually the most effective. Thus far, the technology responsible for this information complexity offers little to help us quickly understand and act upon it. Although visualization is useful, its techniques are typically too slow or simply not designed to help users understand highly time-sensitive and dynamic information streams. To address this, we developed TextPool, a system that uses temporal pooling to visualize live text streams such as newswires and system telemetry. In temporal pooling, systems gather recent stream content into a buffer (pool) to use for visualization. Because the stream continues to flow through the pool in real time, the visualization must be dynamic, using motion to respond to the pool's changing content. The TextPool system processes live text streams in real time using information retrieval techniques, extracts the most frequently occurring salient terms from the buffered streams, and displays related terms next to one another in a dynamic text collage.