InfoTypography: Information Visualisation through and for Text

在文本是主要信息源的几个字段中，能够表示与其旁边的文本相关的数据非常重要。例如，在语音识别领域中，经常需要显示我们对单词已被准确识别的确定程度。同样，在高级主题搜索中，我们可能想要提供关于某个单词、句子或段落与我们感兴趣的主题有多大关联的信息。在这项工作中，我将研究一种新的可视化技术，该技术允许在不需要额外视觉人工制品的情况下表示与现场文本(文本本身)相关联的数据。这项被称为信息排版技术的技术基于这样一种想法，即我们可以修改字母(字形)的排版参数来有效地表示信息。例如，如果一个单词已经被更确定地识别，或者如果它与正在搜索的主题更相关，则可以使该单词的字母具有更突出的衬线。这项技术可能会提供独特的优势，而不是它不需要额外的视觉人工制品来“污染”文本的事实。例如，有许多不同的排版参数可用于表示许多不同的变量。这项研究的目的是调查这项技术的特性，描述利用它的最佳方式，并建立一个系统，让需要表示这类数据的人可以使用它。最后，通过在数字人文领域的应用，将该技术付诸实践。

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.