SparQs: Visual Analytics for Sparking Creativity in Social Media Exploration

Social media has become a fruitful platform on which to study human behavior and social phenomena. However, social media data are usually messy, disorganized, and noisy, which makes finding patterns in such data a challenging task. Visualization can help with the exploration of such massive data. Researchers studying social media often begin by reviewing related research. In this paper, we consider the idea that information from related research can be incorporated into social media visualization tools in order to spark creativity and guide exploration. To develop an effective overview of social media research with which to seed our tool, we conducted a content analysis of social media related papers and designed SparQs, a visual analytics tool to spark creativity in social media exploration. We conducted a pilot evaluation with three social media researchers as well as a participatory design workshop to explore further directions.