| This thesis presents preliminary studies focusing on personal visualization of academic careers using bibliographic databases. Considering an egocentric viewpoint, our visualization design is based on a botanic tree metaphor with information encoded in tree features. First, to apply this visual design to a research setting, we built a web-based system for sociologists to study contact information between people. Then we involve bibliographic data to extend the usage of the botanic tree visualization design. Through interactions and customized mappings, the system can be utilized not only for research purposes but also for personal exploration.;Our work focuses on visually characterizing personal bibliographic data into a botanical tree design. This results in a visually interesting and information rich depiction of one's research career in terms of publication records. Our case studies reveal both the strengths and limitations of the botanical tree visualization design.;Lastly, we conduct a comparative study on personal visualizations of bibliographic data. We consider three designs for egocentric visualization: node-link diagrams, adjacency matrices, and botanical trees for visually characterizing one's academic career. Different scenarios are designed to evaluate the effectiveness of the resulting visualizations for conveying a particular aspect of a researcher's bibliographic records. Based on this comparative study, we find that node-link diagrams are better at revealing the overall distribution of certain attributes, adjacency matrices can convey more information with less clutter, and botanical trees are visually attractive and provide the best at a glance characterization of the mapped data. However, mapping data to tree features must be carefully done to derive an expressive visualization. |
