Integrating interactivity into visualising sentiment analysis of blogs

With an increased amount of freely available online resources and strong interest in automatic crawling and analysis on such resources, suitable visualisation techniques to present the results of such analysis present an important agenda for the visualisation research community. Interactivity on the Web has also become much more commonplace and acceptable as today's Web technologies such as Web 2.0 and Flash become more widespread. While conventional graphs and charts augmented with interactivity are one way to present the output of analysis, an interaction strategy that leverages the interactivity style of the Web should be more suitable than what we see today. We present a novel interactive visualisation technique designed and implemented on top of text-based sentiment analysis for financial blog posts where a user can easily search and browse bloggers' aggregated opinions on commercial companies in a way that helps understand the levels of online opinion in a summarised as well as a detailed manner.