Representations of documents with Icons or glyphs

[Alain Vaillancourt]

Hello!

In the field of Scientific data visualisation multivariate numerical 
data is sometimes expressed with an icon or a glyph.

Sometimes this glyph is mapped onto a 2D or 3D representation of the 
experiment, as in the work of Wittenbrink, Pang and Lohda.

Sometimes the icons or glyphs are presented without any background, 
in large arrays permitting users to spot similarities between them, 
as is usually the case with Chernoff faces or their descendants, Flury-
Riedwyl faces.

I am interested in doing research on ways non-numerical data (such as 
an article's author, title or subject) can be expressed with icons or 
glyphs, in circumstances where they are presented with no background, 
but also in circumstances where they are mapped onto significant 
infromation visualisation images like Kohonen maps or other self-
extracting maps.

I went around the information Visualisation projects collected on the 
Cyberstacks sites and I found none that looked in any way at the 
question of iconic or glyphic document representation.  The most 
sophisticated ones used colored spheres to represent documents.  Which 
is a long way off from data expressed in Chernhoff faces or typical 
data glyphs.

Is anyone aware of any research being done on the topic?

I have the impression I am about to do some rather heavy 
trailblazing, since mapping textual or conceptual data on glyphs 
seems to be radically different from mapping numerical data.

It is very interesting though.

Thank you for your directions, if any

Alain Vaillancourt

cxv3 at musica.mcgill.ca

or

ndgmtlcd at gslis.lan.mcgill.ca

4320 Kensington
Montreal QC
H4B 2W3