Knowledge Management International Conference (KMICe) 2018, 25 –27 July 2018, Miri Sarawak, Malaysia http://www.kmice.cms.net.my/ 12 An Overview of Information Visualization for Malay Poetry Studies Zakiah Noh 2 , Siti Z. Z. Abidin 1,2 , Nasiroh Omar 2 , Sharifah Aliman 2 and Norizah Ardi 3 1 Advanced Analytics Engineering Centre (AAEC) 2 Faculty of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, UiTM Shah Alam, Malaysia, {zakiahnoh@gmail.com, zaleha@tmsk.uitm.edu.my, nasiroh@tmsk.uitm.edu.my, sharifahali@tmsk.uitm.edu.my} 3 Academy of Language Studies, UiTM Shah Alam, Malaysia, {norizah@salam.uitm.edu.my} ABSTRACT Information visualization is an application that represents data in a graphical form and meaningful way. In poetry studies, graphics can offer an excellent approach for exploring and presenting features of poetic elements. The significances of representing the poetic features by using graphics in visualization are to provide users with better understanding of poem features and expose the details of texts elements. In recent years, several significant studies have focused on visualization of poem elements. This paper summarizes the visualization of poetry studies and provides analytical views for the potential of information visualization in the Malay poetry study. Various kind of research in this area may assist other researchers to gain insight into the research trends and benefits towards the literary field for exploring text analytics. Keywords: Information visualization, literary studies, Malay poetry, poem features, text analysis. I INTRODUCTION Visualization can be applied to multidisciplinary domain areas including education, medical, human computer interaction, and engineering. Visualization is a tool that assists observation, facilitates external memorization, stimulates and evaluates hypotheses and disseminates knowledge through effective communication (Chen, Floridi, & Borgo, 2014). The advantage of visualization makes it dominant in various fields including information visualization, scientific visualization, knowledge visualization, visual communication and visual analytics. In information visualization specifically on literary studies, the visualization process uncover the hidden features of poetry that are hard to be illustrated with external memorization including detecting sentiment elements in text data (Kucher, 2018). Traditional approach is employed to explore the features of the poetry by literary scholar without the power of visualization technology in literary studies. Traditional methods such as oral readings and audio are used to help users to pronounce correct words. These methods indirectly decline the process of poetry learning, as some of the elements in poetry cannot be described verbally. According to Moretti (2005), using visualization in literary studies can help researchers to obtain additional understanding in their related works. Previous works on Malay studies focused on distant reading which is an abstract view to visualize global features from a single or multiple text (Jänicke, Franzini, Cheema, & Scheuermann, 2015). Little attention has been paid to research on close reading in Malay poetry. Close reading is a process that reads word by word and line by line to explore different features of the texts. Although a few studies exist on close reading in poetry, the studies are mostly focused on English poetry, which is different from Malay poetry. Thus, this study explores the potential of using information visualization on Malay poetry studies, and some previous works on poetry studies are analyzed. There are several types of Malay poetry such as pantun, puisi, gurindam and sajak. This research focuses on Malay pantun only as a case study to explore their features by using information visualization. These efforts indirectly show the importance of preserving Malay pantun. II TOWARDS DIGITAL POETRY Advances in computing have brought a new revolution in many fields including the field of literature. The literary elements are transformed into digital form by using the approaches in information visualization. A piece of data can be represented in an art manner to enhance understanding, and to manipulate a data using graphical form. Based on the research conducted by Levie and Lentz (1982), there are various effects experienced by individuals who study a field of knowledge using pictorial or graphics, which will increase interest and excitement while studying, influencing attitudes, and improving emotional reactions. The effectiveness in presenting spatial information that is difficult to specify in the form of words will be also increased. Furthermore, in information visualization, the visual channel or visual encoding portrays an important role to convey the information in a meaningful way. The types of visual channel include color, size, spatial position orientation, texture, shape and