TextTile: An Interactive Visualization Tool for Seamless Exploratory Analysis of Structured Data and Unstructured Text

We describe TextTile, a data visualization tool for investigation of datasets and questions that require seamless and flexible analysis of structured data and unstructured text. TextTile is based on real-world data analysis problems gathered through our interaction with a number of domain experts and provides a general purpose solution to such problems. The system integrates a set of operations that can interchangeably be applied to the structured as well as to unstructured text part of the data to generate useful data summaries. Such summaries are then organized in visual tiles in a grid layout to allow their analysis and comparison. We validate TextTile with task analysis, use cases and a user study showing the system can be easily learned and proficiently used to carry out nontrivial tasks.