Caroline Q. Santos

Visualization and Social Media Data Analysis: preliminary studies about data analysts' perception

This paper presents preliminary results of a survey conducted to understand the needs of social network data analysts in relation to data visualization. Semistructured interviews were conducted in order to find out if analysts know and use data visualization, as well how they consider it important. This is work in progress that aims to raise a discussion on understanding the needs of analysts in relation to data visualization. From the data collected, it could be observed that social media data analysts know the concept of data visualization, and they believe that its use could significantly improve the analysis process. Some analysts think tools are complex, and others consider that the available tools do not fully meet their needs.

Interacting with Data to Create Journalistic Stories: A Systematic Review

With the increasing amount of data available in digital media, new professional practices emerged in journalism to gather, analyze and compute quantitative data that aims to yield potential pieces of information relevant to news reporting. The constant evolution of the field motivated us to perform a systematic review of the literature on data-driven journalism to investigate the state-of-art of the field, concerning the process, expressed by the “inverted pyramid of data journalism”. We aim to understand what are the techniques and tools that are currently being used to collect, clean, analyze, and visualize data. Also, we want to know what are the data sources that are presently being used in data journalism projects. We searched databases that include publications from both fields of computing and communication, and the results are presented and discussed through data visualizations. We identified the years with the highest number of publications, the publications’ authors and the fields of study. Then, we classified these works according to the changes in quantitative practices in journalism, and to the contributions in different categories. Finally, we address the challenges and potential research topics in the data journalism field. We believe the information gathered can be helpful to researchers, developers, and designers that are interested in data journalism.

Analyzing Design Strategies for Narrative Visualization

In the past few years, telling stories with data (narrative visualization) has been receiving progressive attention, due to many benefits of its use. Seminal works in the field mapped the main characteristics involved in designing this kind of visualization. However, through analyzing a set of related academic studies and comparing them with such seminal works, we identified unexplored characteristics. The main contribution of this paper is an extension of the original narrative design space proposals, identifying what main design strategies adopted in academia and research opportunities are, regarding design and interaction of the narrative visualization spectrum.

Media Professionals’ Opinions about Interactive Visualizations of Political Polarization during Brazilian Presidential Campaigns on Twitter

Interactive data visualization techniques are an important way to obtain information from large datasets. Data journalism is an emerging area that strongly makes use of such techniques. In this work we investigate the relationship between journalists (and media professionals) in their job routine and data visualization, with the main goal of understanding if these professionals know and use data visualization tools in their job context, as well as if they consider these resources to be important. For this, we present the results of a survey made with journalists and media professionals to analyze how interactive visualizations could help them to get insight or knowledge of such data, and if their use may improve and support these professionals’ activities. The results indicate that visualization and data analysis tools are still not easily accessible by those professionals, and therefore still less influential than they could be. However, most participants considered data visualization a valuable resource in their news production routines. As a contribution, we also identified positive points and understanding gaps of visualizations, as well as the perception of journalists and media professionals about getting information from data visualization.

Using Information Visualization Techniques to Improve the Perception of the Organizations' Image on Social Networks

Nowadays it is notorious the growth and the popularity of social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, especially with the facilities provided by the use of mobile devices. Considering these social networks, Twitter has a different approach: a friendship connection doesn’t need to exist and a person can follow another person or organization just to receive its tweets. So, this social network is often used as a way to get general or specific news and to express (dis)satisfaction about products, politics, organizations, etc. Considering this, the need for organizations to monitor what people are “saying” about them has arisen. Thus, the main goal of this work is to understand how information visualization techniques can support and improve the analysis of the perceived image of organizations on social networks. For this, we developed an application prototype to support sentiment analyses on Twitter and we conducted a study on how this prototype, called MentionStats, can contribute to the company’s image analysis on Twitter. This study consisted on interviews with professionals about their perceptions of the MentionStats and its visualizations. Our main contribution are the presented possibilities of using information visualization techniques in order to help users to deepen the analysis of their organizations image on social networks, and also users’ impressions about this.