Visual analysis of the opinion flow among multiple social groups

Abstract

Journalists, government agency and the public may hold different opinions about the same event; these opinions flow within and across multiple social groups. Understanding opinion flow in multiple social groups is conducive to have a quick grasp of the information on social media. Our study aims to explore the opinion flow within or across the pre-defined social groups and the mutual influence of these groups’ views about the same event. First of all, to depict the opinion flow, we propose a topic transition model, and for expressing the interaction of groups’ opinion, we propose a quantitative approach. Secondly, according to 4Ws, we design a visual analytic system to let users analyze public opinion events through our system. The visual interface is tightly coupled with the analytical methods to present a concise summary of the opinion flow of events. A novel forwarding-network slicing diagram is designed to depict the forwarding process. To describe the result of the topic transition model, we also propose a topic transition graph to characterize the opinion flow. And a novel glyph is designed to visualize the characteristic of the influence. Our system provides a variety of interactions to assist users in exploring data, and we demonstrate the functionality of the system through two case studies.