Project file archives are becoming increasingly large. The number of files, information and data that need to be created, accessed and modified throughout a project can be overwhelming. It is critical for project participants or contributors to find relevant information in project archives quickly. In this thesis, I present VisArchive, an interactive visualization tool that provides users with better awareness of search results within project archives. VisArchive visualizes the relevance-ranked search results with a color-coded stacked bar chart and interactive timelines and provides supporting visual cues to help differentiate search results based on searched keywords. It aims to allow users to interactively search, browse, and explore information in project archives, including access history, effectively and efficiently. I will present two case studies to illustrate how VisArchive can be used to support searching, browsing, and exploring information in building construction and open source software projects. In addition, I discuss how VisArchive can be improved to address information retrieval problems and work across different domains. VisArchive demonstrates the combination and application of several visualization techniques to the problem of searching and navigating project archives. / Graduate / 0984

Project file archives are becoming increasingly large. The number of files, information and data that need to be created, accessed and modified throughout a project can be overwhelming. It is critical for project participants or contributors to find relevant information in project archives quickly. In this thesis, I present VisArchive, an interactive visualization tool that provides users with better awareness of search results within project archives. VisArchive visualizes the relevance-ranked search results with a color-coded stacked bar chart and interactive timelines and provides supporting visual cues to help differentiate search results based on searched keywords. It aims to allow users to interactively search, browse, and explore information in project archives, including access history, effectively and efficiently. I will present two case studies to illustrate how VisArchive can be used to support searching, browsing, and exploring information in building construction and open source software projects. In addition, I discuss how VisArchive can be improved to address information retrieval problems and work across different domains. VisArchive demonstrates the combination and application of several visualization techniques to the problem of searching and navigating project archives. / Graduate / 0984