Visual Interactivity for Exploring in-situ Timestamped Data through Temporal Alignment

This paper describes tools we have developed to interactively explore visualized multiple streams of recorded timestamped activity data, including text, images, audio, video and other types of numerical sensor data. The Orca (ObservationRepresentation-Communication-Archival) tools temporarily align multiple streams of data in a chronological table format, or plot activity data in every period of certain fixed time or in every occurrence of a certain phrase. Users would then assume or deduce cause-effect relationships among recorded events and phenomena inferred by the temporal order, identify some trends of occurrences of a particular event, or understand frequencies and distributions of certain phenomena by interacting with Orca. We discuss how such tools would help users capture and externalize knowledge embedded in activity data captured in situ.