RevEx : Visual Investigative Journalism with A Million Healthcare Reviews

In this paper, we present RevEx (Review Explorer), a visual analytic platform to help investigative journalists explore large sets of crowd-sourced reviews. RevEx uses a combination of faceted search and visualization to single out reviews with a desired combination of parameters and keywords (e.g., reviews with 1 star containing the word ”food”). We developed this tool in collaboration with ProPublica, an independent non-profit newsroom, to help journalists look into more than one million reviews on healthcare providers from Yelp. The paper describes the main motivation behind the tool, its design rationale, and discoveries made through its use. We also discuss how the same methods can be used to explore other possible data sets and thus support to the development of numerous additional journalistic investigations.

[1]  Tamara Munzner,et al.  Overview: The Design, Adoption, and Analysis of a Visual Document Mining Tool for Investigative Journalists , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[2]  Daniel A. Keim,et al.  Visual Sentiment Analysis of RSS News Feeds Featuring the US Presidential Election in 2008 , 2009 .

[3]  John T. Stasko,et al.  Jigsaw: Supporting Investigative Analysis through Interactive Visualization , 2007, 2007 IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics Science and Technology.

[4]  Qiang Zhang,et al.  TIARA: a visual exploratory text analytic system , 2010, KDD '10.

[5]  Eugene J. Shekita,et al.  Beyond basic faceted search , 2008, WSDM '08.

[6]  Paul M. B. Vitányi,et al.  The Google Similarity Distance , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

[7]  Mor Naaman,et al.  Diamonds in the rough: Social media visual analytics for journalistic inquiry , 2010, 2010 IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics Science and Technology.

[8]  Gary Marchionini,et al.  Coupling browse and search in highly interactive user interfaces: a study of the relation browser++ , 2004, JCDL.

[9]  Moritz Stefaner,et al.  Elastic Lists for Facet Browsing and Resource Analysis in the Enterprise , 2008, 2008 19th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications.

[10]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  Users can change their web search tactics: Design guidelines for categorized overviews , 2008, Inf. Process. Manag..

[11]  Marti A. Hearst.  Search User Interfaces , 2009 .

[12]  Elizabeth G. Hetzler,et al.  Analysis experiences using information visualization , 2004, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.