This dissertation presents a new tool for exploratory text analysis that attempts to improve the experience of navigating and exploring text and its metadata. The design of the tool was motivated by the unmet need for text analysis tools in the humanities and social sciences. In these fields, it is common for scholars to have hundreds or thousands…

Communities, also called clusters or modules, are groups of nodes which probably share common properties and/or play similar roles within a graph. They widely exist in real networks such as biological, social, and information networks. Allowing users to interactively browse and explore the community structure, which is essential for understanding…

Wayfinding is a kind of spatial riddle that people encounter almost daily. Although it has been well documented that wayfinding elements--namely, environmental cues, people and time--significantly influence wayfinding, there has been little work done to examine the effectiveness of those influences. In particular, the notion of wayfindingly…

This study provides insights with regard to the types of cognitive processes that are involved in the formation of mental models and the way those models change over the course of a semester in novice programmers doing a design task. Eight novice programmers participated in this study for three distinct software design sessions, using the same…

This research study provides the finding of a qualitative case study in Technology, Engineering, and Design Education as well as Social Studies Education. The purpose of this study was to describe the role of graphics within a social studies lesson by examining a student's experience when a new lesson is implemented in class. The participants were…