Reorganize Your Blogs: Supporting Blog Re-visitation with Natural Language Processing and Visualization

Shuo Niu,D Scott Mccrickard,Timothy L Stelter,Alan Dix,G Don Taylor

doi:10.3390/mti3040066

Shuo Niu, D Scott Mccrickard + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/mti3040066

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Abstract

Temporally-connected personal blogs contain voluminous textual content, presenting challenges in re-visiting and reflecting on experiences. Other data repositories have benefited from natural language processing (NLP) and interactive visualizations (VIS) to support exploration, but little is known about how these techniques could be used with blogs to present experiences and support multimodal interaction with blogs, particularly for authors. This paper presents the effect of reorganization—reorganizing the large blog set with NLP and presenting abstract topics with VIS—to support novel re-visitation experiences to blogs. The BlogCloud tool, a blog re-visitation tool that reorganizes blog paragraphs around user-searched keywords, implements reorganization and similarity-based content grouping. Through a public use session with bloggers who wrote about extended hikes, we observed the effect of NLP-based reorganization in delivering novel re-visitation experiences. Findings suggest that the re-presented topics provide new reflection materials and re-visitation paths, enabling interaction with symbolic items in memory.

Highlights

Digital personal archives log life materials chronologically, necessitating the identification of novel user experiences in re-visiting them and generating new ideas [1,2,3]
We examined two blog reorganization approaches to support re-visitation: natural language processing (NLP) techniques break the original order of blogs; users can search keywords among blogs and re-visit blog sections that are similar to a particular experience (Figure 1)
To examine the opportunities of natural language processing in supporting multimodal interaction with one’s own large personal blogs, we report our experiences with long-distance hikers re-visiting their hiking blogs with BlogCloud

Summary

Introduction

Digital personal archives log life materials chronologically, necessitating the identification of novel user experiences in re-visiting them and generating new ideas [1,2,3]. Personal textual content such as blogs has long been under-studied in re-visitation [3] and generation of new perspectives about self [5]. The textual content takes time to read, especially when it grows massively large but minimally organized [6,7]. When bloggers need to re-visit and share stories from blogs, for example during themed conferences or meetings, the massive volume and textual nature of blogs makes it hard to understand core themes and capture an overview and connections. People spend time crafting blogs, recording moments in life, and capturing essences of thoughts [8]. In 2017, blog authors on the WordPress crafted over 80 million new blog posts each month (a live look at activity across WordPress.com (September 2018): https://wordpress.com/activity/)

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