Making Smooth Topical Connections on Touch Devices

A strategy is proposed for mining, browsing, and searching through documents consisting of text, images, and other modalities: A collection of documents is represented as a grid of keywords with varying font sizes that indicate the words’ weights. The grid is based on the counting-grid model so that each document matches in its word usage the word-weight distribution in some window in the grid. This strategy leads to denser packing and higher relatedness of nearby documents—documents that map to overlapping windows literally share the words found in the overlap. Smooth thematic shifts become evident in the grid, providing connections among distant topics and guiding the user’s attention in search for the spot of interest.