1 Visualizing Live Text Streams Using Motion and Temporal Pooling Conrad Albrecht-Buehler Benjamin Watson David A. Shamma Northwestern University {conrad, watsonb, ayman}@cs.northwestern.edu ABSTRACT In today’s fast-paced world, it is increasingly difficult to understand and act promptly upon the content of the many information streams available. Temporal pooling addresses this problem by producing a visual summary of recent stream content. This summary is often in motion to incorporate newly arrived content and to stay up-to-date. We therefore review the perception of motion and change blindness, offering several guidelines for the use of motion in visualization. We then describe TextPool, a tool for visualizing live text streams such as newswires, blogs and closed captioning. TextPool’s temporal pooling summarization is a dynamic textual collage that clusters related terms. We tested TextPool with the content of several RSS newswire feeds, streaming 800 stories per day. TextPool was able to handle this bandwidth well, producing useful summarizations of stream content. We then examine TextPool in the light of our guidelines, and speculate on other possible implementations of temporal pooling. CR Categories: I.3.8 [Computer Graphics]: Applications; I.7.0 [Document and Text Processing]: General; H.5.0 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: General Keywords: information visualization, data streams, text layout, information retrieval, newswires, motion, perception. 1 Temporal pooling of live information streams The informational context in which we live and work is becoming increasingly complex. It is certainly richer, with information much more accessible than it ever has been. It is also faster- paced, with news and developments spreading over the media and the internet more quickly than they would have even two decades ago. Such an environment requires new capabilities in information synthesis, enabling analysts and researchers to understand broad trends emerging from many disparate sources. These syntheses must also be timely: in today’s competitive world, the first response to a trend is usually the most effective response. Yet the same technology that has produced this information complexity offers little help in quickly understanding and acting upon it. Visualization is a useful tool, but its techniques are typically too slow or simply not designed for achieving understanding of highly time-sensitive and dynamic information streams.