I am attending my first OzChi conference - OzChi 2010 in Brisbane, Australia. Having not been to any OzChi conferences before, I was interested in analysing papers across years in order to find common themes. I have used a matrix decomposition algorithm to uncover the main research themes from previous conferences and well as the current OzChi conference. Each year (2006 - 2010) was analysed separately, with only the paper abstracts being included in the analysis. I used jQuery to extract the text for the abstracts from the online proceedings. Each abstract was then added to a term-document matrix with common words such as “design, paper, present, presented, display, displays, displayed, develop, developed” removed. The Non-negative Matrix Factorisation algorithm was used to uncover themes or topics within the accepted papers for each year. The main words found in the top 5 themes for each conference are listed. Mobile and location aware application research seems to be present from across all years analysed.
OzChi 2006
| Theme | Main Words |
| Theme 1 | awareness [16] social [33] technology [50] cue [9] study [35] |
| Theme 2 | usability [29] software [26] model [18] mobile [25] develop [28] evaluate [27] |
| Theme 3 | keyboard [11] key [11] input [13] wearable [7] text [9] |
| Theme 4 | develop [28] technique [19] software [26] tool [21] participatory [7] |
| Theme 5 | probe [20] technology [50] culture [15] method [24] children [9] |
OzChi 2007
| Theme | Main Words |
| Theme 1 | gesture [25] remote [17] physical [19] |
| Theme 2 | mobile [17] tool [21] everyday [11] usage [8] life [7] |
| Theme 3 | visualization [22] support [35] information [18] tool [21] |
| Theme 4 | speech [11] cognitive load [11] multimodal [7] |
| Theme 5 | physical [19] interaction [42] community [21] game [9] social [8] |
OzChi 2008
| Theme | Main Words |
| Theme 1 | community [44] technology [41] social [34] interact [46] design [31] network [14] |
| Theme 2 | game [25] player [8] participation [26] study [37] interact [46] approach [14] |
| Theme 3 | speech [10] cognitive load [6] measure [5] |
| Theme 4 | mobile [30] usage [10] phone [13] feature [11] |
| Theme 5 | interact [46] design [31] body [10] kinesthetic [7] |
OzChi 2009
| Theme | Main Words |
| Theme 1 | technology [47] social [26] design [28] support [31] practice [15] participation [23] |
| Theme 2 | scroll [22] tilt [8] flick [5] task [19] |
| Theme 3 | active [43] physical [13] game [9] user [27] play [7] |
| Theme 4 | location [23] share [10] data [15] map [10] phone [9] |
| Theme 5 | group [23] study [40] older [8] research [39] adult [6] feedback [8] |
OzChi 2010
| Theme | Main Words |
| Theme 1 | experience [61] game [18] interact [51] product [9] person [16] ux [4] |
| Theme 2 | search [21] web [20] inform [38] cognitive [13] style [7] find [23] |
| Theme 3 | cloud [14] tag [13] table [6] visualisation [4] social [32] task [17] |
| Theme 4 | mobile [30] news [6] profession [8] quality [12] study [51] evaluation [25] |
| Theme 5 | technology [47] social [32] people [22] inform [38] older [9] isolated [4] |
| Theme 6 | real-time [8] coordination [5] challenge [11] sound [3] musician [3] explore [26] |
| Theme 7 | inform [38] role [18] interact [51] copresence [3] eparticipation [4] |
I have built an interactive theme or topic explorer tool as part of my research at QUT. The tool is powered by the Non-negative Matrix Factorisation and Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithms. The tool allows users to interact with algorithm parameters, includes techniques to assist with data interpretation and was used to perform the analysis. Feedback on the analysis is welcome and appreciated.
Making sense of the twitter feed from OzChi 2010 will be published tomorrow. Stay tuned!