An Application of Edge Bundling Techniques to the Visualization of Media Analysis Results

The advent of consumer-generated and social media has led to a continuous expansion and diversification of the media landscape. Media consumers frequently find themselves assuming the role of media analysts in order to satisfy personal information needs. We propose to employ Knowledge Visualization methods in support of complex media analysis tasks. In this paper, we describe an approach which depicts semantic relationships between key political actors using node-link diagrams. Our contribution comprises a force-directed edge bundling algorithm which accounts for semantic properties of edges, a technical evaluation of the algorithm and a report on a real-world application of the approach. The resulting visualization fosters the identification of high-level edge patterns which indicate strong semantic relationships. It has been published by the Austrian Press Agency APA in 2009.