abstract: Although there are many forms of organization on the Web, one of the most prominent ways to organize web content and websites are tags. Tags are keywords or terms that are assigned to a specific piece of content in order to help users understand the common relationships between pieces of content. Tags can either be assigned by an algorithm, the author, or the community. These tags can also be organized into tag clouds, which are visual representations of the structure and organization contained implicitly within these tags. Importantly, little is known on how we use these different tagging structures to understand the content and structure of a given site. This project examines 2 different characteristics of tagging structures: font size and spatial orientation. In order to examine how these different characteristics might interact with individual differences in attentional control, a measure of working memory capacity (WMC) was included. The results showed that spatial relationships affect how well users understand the structure of a website. WMC was not shown to have any significant effect; neither was varying the font size. These results should better inform how tags and tag clouds are used on the Web, and also provide an estimation of what properties to include when designing and implementing a tag cloud on a website. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Applied Psychology 2011

Automated summarization is a difficult task. World-class summarizers can provide only "best guesses" of which sentences encapsulate the important content from within a set of documents. As automated systems continue to improve, users are still not given the means to observe complex relationships between seemingly independent concepts. In this research we used singular value decompositions to organize concepts and determine the best candidate sentences for an automated summary. The results from this straightforward attempt were comparable to world-class summarizers. We then included a clustered tag cloud, using a singular value decomposition to measure term "interestingness" with respect to the set of documents. The combination of best candidate sentences and tag clouds provided a more inclusive summary than a traditionally-developed summarizer alone. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-24 16:31:25.261

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-12T22:56:34Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 arquivo1229_1.pdf: 2037381 bytes, checksum: 76ef1d886b39ab00e1420e5b4c061499 (MD5) license.txt: 1748 bytes, checksum: 8a4605be74aa9ea9d79846c1fba20a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011 / Propusemos nesse estudo que a Psicologia pode contribuir para a produção de conhecimento na área de Design e, para isso, nos apoiamos na perspectiva pragmática para analisar a produção de sentidos sobre tag clouds. Este termo refere-se a um recurso criado para representar o processo de tagging, de atribuir palavras-chave aos conteúdos da web, frequentemente utilizado em blogs. Objetivamos, então, identificar os sentidos produzidos por blogueiros sobre tag clouds a respeito dos motivos de incorporação desse recurso nos blogs e dos padrões de utilização. Para a construção de dados, pesquisamos por posts que discutiram sobre a utilização de tag clouds, visando a identificação dos sentidos sobre os motivos de incorporação; e, por outro lado, para investigar os sentidos sobre os padrões de utilização, convidamos blogueiros para a participação de entrevistas sobre o tema. Encontramos que os sentidos produzidos sobre os motivos de incorporação são direcionados a comparações intrarecurso, entre tipos de tag clouds, e inter-recurso, entre tag clouds e outros recurso como lista de tags e menu. Em relação aos padrões de utilização identificamos que estes estiveram relacionados aos sistemas de informação hospedeiros dos blogs. No 'Blogger.com', tag clouds caracterizam-se como menus para navegação nas páginas pessoais e, em geral, os blogueiros optaram por utilizá-lo nos blogs, e, por outro lado, no 'Wordpress.com', os blogueiros, em sua maioria, não optaram por utilizar tag clouds em suas páginas, já que as tags criadas direcionam para a navegação no sistema de informação. Concluimos, então, que representar tags através de tag clouds no próprio blog significa utilizar esses dados parcialmente, isto é, considerando apenas seu aspecto individual. Contudo, ao representar o conjunto de tags de um sistema de informação em uma única tag clouds, prioriza-se o aspecto coletivo. Porém, as duas dimensões, individual e coletiva, não são excludentes e ao precisar optar por uma dessas, os blogueiros são afastados do que parece ser a característica e função diferenciadora de tags e tag clouds na atividade, isto é, a união entre informações individuais e coletivas, entre interesses e conhecimentos que falam sobre um sujeito e, ao mesmo tempo, sobre uma comunidade

Developing and maintaining software is a difficult task, and finding effective methods of understanding software is more necessary now than ever with the last few decades seeing a dramatic climb in the scale of software. Appropriate visualisations may enable greater understanding of the datasets we deal with in software engineering. As an aid for sense-making, visualisation is widely used in daily life (through graphics such as weather maps and road signs), as well as in other research domains, and is thought to be exceedingly beneficial. Unfortunately, there has not been widespread use of the multitude of techniques which have proposed for the software engineering domain. Tag clouds are a simple, text-based visualisation commonly found on the internet. Typically, implementations of tag clouds have not included rich interactive features which are necessary for data exploration. In this thesis, I introduce design considerations and a task set for enabling interaction in a tag cloud visualisation system. These considerations are based on an analysis of challenges in visualising software engineering data, and the perceptive influences of visual properties available in tag clouds. The design and implementation of interactive system Taggle based on these considerations is also presented, along with its broad-based evaluation. Evaluation approaches were informed by a systematic mapping study of previous tag cloud evaluation, providing an overview of existing research in the domain. The design of Taggle was improved following a heuristic evaluation by domain experts. Subsequent evaluations were divided into two parts - experiments focused on the tag cloud visualisation technique itself, and a task-based approach focused on the whole interactive system. As evidenced in the series of evaluative studies, the enhanced tag cloud features incorporated into Taggle enabled faster visual search response time, and the system could be used with minimal training to discover relevant information about an unknown software engineering dataset.

Developing and maintaining software is a difficult task, and finding effective methods of understanding software is more necessary now than ever with the last few decades seeing a dramatic climb in the scale of software. Appropriate visualisations may enable greater understanding of the datasets we deal with in software engineering. As an aid for sense-making, visualisation is widely used in daily life (through graphics such as weather maps and road signs), as well as in other research domains, and is thought to be exceedingly beneficial. Unfortunately, there has not been widespread use of the multitude of techniques which have proposed for the software engineering domain. Tag clouds are a simple, text-based visualisation commonly found on the internet. Typically, implementations of tag clouds have not included rich interactive features which are necessary for data exploration. In this thesis, I introduce design considerations and a task set for enabling interaction in a tag cloud visualisation system. These considerations are based on an analysis of challenges in visualising software engineering data, and the perceptive influences of visual properties available in tag clouds. The design and implementation of interactive system Taggle based on these considerations is also presented, along with its broad-based evaluation. Evaluation approaches were informed by a systematic mapping study of previous tag cloud evaluation, providing an overview of existing research in the domain. The design of Taggle was improved following a heuristic evaluation by domain experts. Subsequent evaluations were divided into two parts - experiments focused on the tag cloud visualisation technique itself, and a task-based approach focused on the whole interactive system. As evidenced in the series of evaluative studies, the enhanced tag cloud features incorporated into Taggle enabled faster visual search response time, and the system could be used with minimal training to discover relevant information about an unknown software engineering dataset.

Collaborative tagging is a simple and effective method for organizing and sharing web resources using human created metadata. It has arisen out of the need for an efficient method of personal organization, as the number of digital resources in everyday lives increases. While tagging has become a proven organization scheme through its popularity and widespread use on the Web, little is known about its implications and how it may effectively be applied in different situations. This is due to the fact that tagging has evolved through several iterations of use on social software websites, rather than through a scientific or an engineering design process. The research presented in this thesis, through investigations in the domain of e-learning, seeks to understand more about the scientific nature of collaborative tagging through a number of human subject studies. While broad in scope, touching on issues in human computer interaction, knowledge representation, Web system architecture, e-learning, metadata, and information visualization, this thesis focuses on how collaborative tagging can supplement the growing metadata requirements of e-learning. I conclude by looking at how the findings may be used in future research, through using information based in the emergent social networks of social software, to automatically adapt to the needs of individual users.

Collaborative tagging is a simple and effective method for organizing and sharing web resources using human created metadata. It has arisen out of the need for an efficient method of personal organization, as the number of digital resources in everyday lives increases. While tagging has become a proven organization scheme through its popularity and widespread use on the Web, little is known about its implications and how it may effectively be applied in different situations. This is due to the fact that tagging has evolved through several iterations of use on social software websites, rather than through a scientific or an engineering design process. The research presented in this thesis, through investigations in the domain of e-learning, seeks to understand more about the scientific nature of collaborative tagging through a number of human subject studies. While broad in scope, touching on issues in human computer interaction, knowledge representation, Web system architecture, e-learning, metadata, and information visualization, this thesis focuses on how collaborative tagging can supplement the growing metadata requirements of e-learning. I conclude by looking at how the findings may be used in future research, through using information based in the emergent social networks of social software, to automatically adapt to the needs of individual users.