VISUALIZING BACKCHANNEL FOR LARGE-SCALE EVENTS

The concept of a Visual Backchannel as a novel way of following and exploring online conversations about large-scale events. Micro blogging communities, such as Twitter, are increasingly used as digital backchannels for timely exchange of brief comments and impressions during political speeches, sport competitions, natural disasters, and other large events. Currently, shared updates are typically displayed in the form of a simple list, making it difficult to get a summary of the fast-paced discussions as it happens in the moment and how it evolves over time. In distinction, proposed Visual Backchannel design provides an evolving, interactive, and multi-faceted visual overview of large-scale ongoing conversations on Twitter. To visualize a continuously updating information stream, visual saliency for what is happening now and what has just happened, set in the context of the evolving conversation is included. As part of a fully web-based coordinated-view system Topic Streams, a temporally adjustable stacked graph visualizing topics over time, a People Spiral representing participants and their activity, and an Image Cloud encoding the popularity of event photos by size are included. Together with a post listing, discuss our design considerations, in particular with respect to evolving visualizations of dynamically changing data.