How to visualise a conversation: case-based reasoning approach

At present, the complexity and scale of modern digital conversations between people is at its highest level but there is a gap in how to represent these conversations to a user. As a result, it is often hard for a user to understand the flow of a conversation and make an informed decision over it. However, an aesthetic and efficient visualisation can mitigate this drawback of data representation. In this paper, a case-based approach was proposed for choosing an appropriate visualisation for user’s conversations. A case was formulated as a visualisation of a conversation which a user decided to use for his analysis of the conversation. When a user decides to visualise a new conversation, the most similar visualisation type from previous users’ experiences is selected for the visualisation of the new conversation. In this paper, the cases of visualisations of conversations from the IBM Many Eyes platform were collected and a case-based reasoning approach for choosing a visualisation of user’s conversation was designed. Finally, the work of the proposed approach was tested on a sample email conversation, and then four participants evaluated the appropriateness of the chosen visualisation types in comparison with other eight possible visualisations for the email conversation.