InfoTypography: Information Visualisation through and for Text

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In several fields where text is the main source of information, it is important to be able to represent associated data about the text alongside it. For example, in the speech recognition field, it is often necessary to display how certain we are that a word has been recognised accurately. Similarly, in advanced thematic search, we might want to provide information about how much a certain word, sentence, or paragraph, relate to the topic we are interested in.In this work I will investigate a new visualisation technique that allows representing data that is associated to text in-situ (within the text itself), without requiring additional visual artefact. The technique, called InfoTypography, is based on the idea that we can modify typographic parameters of the letters (glyphs) to efficiently represent information. For example, the letters of a word can be made to have more prominent serifs if that word has been recognised with more certainty or if it is more relevant to the topic being searched. The technique might offer singular advantages beyond the fact that it does not require additional visual artefacts to "pollute" the text. For example, there are many different typographic parameters that could be used to represent many different variables. The purpose of this research is to investigate the properties of the technique, to characterise the best ways to take advantage of it, and to build a system that will make it available to people who need to represent this kind of data. Finally, the technique will be put in practice through an application within the digital humanities field.