Studying Animation for Real-Time Visual Analytics: A Design Study of Social Media Analytics in Emergency Management

Domains such as emergency management have a need for real-time change monitoring and pattern analysis, but interface design principles for real-time visual analysis situations are still under development. In this paper, we present early results from a design study in social media visual analytics for emergency management. Our motivation is a main information visualization challenge: the lack of clear design principles informed by research in human cognition for the use of animation in real-time streams. We discuss three domain-specific challenges: (1) Coping with the high volume of social media data that is generated during disaster response, (2) analysts' need to quickly extract relevant features for real-time sense-making; and (3) the effective analysis of social media streams even when some critical attributes are absent. This paper presents preliminary results on a research-based design principle for the use of animation in real-time visual analytics, targeted to support the real-time analysis of social media data in emergency management.