Personal Web Library: Organizing and Visualizing Web Browsing History
Abstract
As more and more activities rely on the Internet, people view many web pages every day for work, research, and entertainment. Personal web browsing history can be regarded as a collection of online resources. However, most current browsers do not sufficiently utilize this dataset. Most browsers’ history function only provide a list of visited websites in chronological order for users to look and search. In this research, the researcher designed a visualization approach to represent personal web browsing history into a more usable tool for a user to organize, recall and reuse visited web pages. An interview was conducted first to understand users’ habits and preferences when using their current browser history interface. The researcher then used a clustering algorithm to group keywords, and designed two levels of interactive visualizations to let the user see the temporal patterns and contents of his/her browsing history. A usability test was conducted to evaluate the visualization with real datasets. The test results showed that this visualization can make users aware of their browsing patterns and point of interests intuitively, and potentially help people find their visited pages by reconstructing the visiting context.
Degree
M.S.
Advisors
Chen, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Design|Information Technology|Information science
Off-Campus Purdue Users:
To access this dissertation, please log in to our
proxy server.