Hierarchical Topic Maps for Visual Exploration and Comparison of Documents

Information visualization nowadays provides a large amount of different text visualization techniques that help to summarize and present textual information in an intuitive and comprehensible manner. Despite many advancements, there remains a gap in effectively illustrating the thematic and structural distinction between similar documents in a hierarchical and interactive manner. We present the Hierarchical Topic Maps (HTM), an innovative approach, inspired by Tile Bars, that addresses this gap by illustrating the content distribution across a document hierarchically. Our model incorporates a multi-resolution display feature, enabling users, in particular curators of large document collections, with the need to quickly obtain text document structure, to delve deeper and draw more meaningful conclusions, to assess thematic similarities at multiple levels of detail, as well as facilitate nuanced comparison of textual documents. We demonstrate the effectiveness of both our approach's document exploration and document comparison potential by two exemplary use case scenarios. Our findings suggest that HTM not only simplifies the document overview process but also provides a practical solution for comparing thematic structures, thereby offering contributions to the field of text visualization and visualization analytics.