Preprint of paper; final version available as: ATTFIELD, S., BLANDFORD, A. & CRAFT, B. (2004) Task Embedded Visualisation: The Design for an Interactive IR Results Display for Journalists. Proc. IEEE Information Visualisation 2004. 650-655. Task Embedded Visualisation: The Design for an Interactive IR Results Display for Journalists Simon Attfield, Ann Blandford, Brock Craft University College London Interaction Centre 4th Floor, Remax House, 31/32 Alfred Place London, WC1E 7DP, Great Britain s.attfield@cs.ucl.ac.uk, a.blandford@cs.ucl.ac.uk, brock@craft.org Abstract There is need for user-centred visualisation research to engage with the activity context, information needs, knowledge and abilities of target user-groups. With a focus on the work of journalists, we first argue for information-retrieval results visualisation as a suitable browsing framework for journalists’ frequently ill- defined needs and high-recall searches. We then describe the design and rationale for a histogram- based visualisation for journalists. We also describe the integration of this idea within a system that structures searching as a two-step query-and-filter operation. This approach is intended to support initial exploratory browsing and refinement in a way that is sympathetic to the systematic focusing that naturally occurs during complex, unstructured task performance. Further, the use of an enduring ‘base’ results set is intended to encourage structural familiarity with the broader results and therefore to enhance navigation. 1: Introduction The landscape of visualisation research provides a rich source of concepts and tools for the representation of interactive, abstract information spaces. Several approaches have been proposed for the representation of document collections and collection sub-sets as tools for supporting document retrieval. Notable approaches include systems that represent document collections in terms of hierarchical classification schemes, such as Hearst’s Cat-a-cone [1], systems that represent document content in terms of the distribution of query term occurrences, such as TileBars [2] and work by Byrd [3], and systems that represent topic clusters within a document collection, such as SPIRE [4 & 5] and Bead [6]. Some work has also been specifically concerned with the visual representation of news report document spaces—the topic of this paper—such as Galaxy of News [7] and BreakingStory [8]. Graphical information-retrieval displays and interactive dynamic querying hold the promise for the smoother integration of technology with the tasks that bring users to need information in the first place. However, the starting point for this paper is that, amidst explorations of the visualisation solution space, design is often based around intuited and implicit ideas of users and task situations, rather than these being empirically grounded and explicit. This is in contrast to user-centred research in Information Science, in which researchers have increasingly emphasised the need to understand the ‘real-life’ contexts for information seeking and information use in order to inform information systems design (see for example [9] & [10]). We argue that there is a need for user-centred visualisation research that engages with: • the activity or work context of user-groups that might bring them to use a system; • the specific problems that this broader activity evoke—and for which a system might provide support;