IssueGalaxy: interactive visualizing tools for the current issues in an internet discussion site

Recently, the social media such as Digg and Slashdot reflect current social trends or major contemporary issues, on which users can publish articles and write comments. The users of such social media typically want to figure out the current issues on which many users are interested. Though these social media provide an abundance of various opinions, it is inconvenient for a user to take a casual glance at the current issues. In this paper, we propose a smart visualizing system IssueGalaxy that extracts current issues and visualizes with the related articles in a single screen shot. The IssueGalaxy consists of several suns, representing current major issues, with a set of planets around them, representing the related articles. Since the IssueGalaxy is presented in a single screen, it is helpful in figuring out the importance and the relations of the current issues of the target site. To test the usefulness of IssueGalaxy, we implemented a prototype and applied it on a set of articles published in an Internet forum site. According to this simple experiment, IssueGalaxy is revealed to helpful for understanding the relationships among the current issues.