Investigating Aspects of Visual Clustering in the Organization of Personal Digital Document Collections

Abstract

Organizing personal collections of digital documents can be frustrating for two main reasons. First, the effort required to work with the folder system on personal computers and the possible misplacement and loss of documents. Second, the lack of effective organization and management tools for personal collections of digital documents. The research in this thesis investigated specific visualization and clustering features intended for organizing collections of documents and built in a prototype interface that was compared to a baseline interface from previous research. The results showed that those features helped users with: 1) the initial classification of documents into clusters during the supervised stage; 2) the modification of clusters; 3) the cluster labeling process; 4) the presentation of the final set of organized documents; 5) the efficiency of the organization process, and 6) achieving better accuracy in the clusters created for organizing the documents.