Visualization for information exploration and analysis

Making sense of data becomes more challenging as the data grows larger and becomes more complex. If a picture truly can be worth a thousand words, then clever visualizations of data should hold promise in helping people with sense-making tasks. I firmly believe that visual representations of data can help people to better explore, analyze, and understand it, thus transforming the data into information. In this talk, I will explain how visualization and visual analytics help people make sense of data and I will provide many such examples. I also will describe my present research into visualization for investigative analysis. This project explores how visual analytics can help investigators examine a large document collection in order to discover embedded stories and narratives scattered across the documents in the collection.