Journal of Engineering Science and Technology (Sep 2017)
AN EVALUATION OF TIMELINE VISUALIZATION AND TREE VIEWER IN CRIME NEWS
Abstract
Finding good and relevant information in crime news is one of the most challenging tasks faced by users. An increase in the amount of information from news media has caused difficulties for users in obtaining relevant information. Hence, visualization is one of the important aspects to enhance user’s understanding when browsing or searching for news. Crime news requires a proper approach to visualize a variety of important information such as suspect, victim, location, time and evidence. Visual navigation is more interactive than linear. This has motivated us to develop a prototype called Crime News Visualization (CNV), which mplements a timeline and tree viewer to assist users when browsing crime news chronologically. The prototype follows several phases of development starting with design concept, implementation and evaluation. News corpus used in this study is from the Bernama Library & Infolink Service (BLIS) resource, with a sample of 247 crime news documents from year 1997 to 2012. A user experiment was conducted with 20 undergraduate students from the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia in order to evaluate the acceptance and perception of interactive browsing of crime news using news portal (baseline) and CNV (experimental). Findings revealed that more than 90% of the respondents indicated that the use of timeline visualization and tree viewer was helpful and had potential to improve the way users browse for crime news content.
