TileBars

The field of information retrieval has traditionally focused on textbases consisting of titles and abstracts. As a consequence, many underlying assumptions must be altered for retrieval from full-length text collections. This paper argues for making use of text structure when retrieving from full text documents, and presents a visualization paradigm, called TileBars, that demonstrates the usefulness of explicit term distribution information in Boolean-type queries. TileBars simultaneously and compactly indicate relative document length, query term frequency, and query term distribution. The patterns in a column of TileBars can be quickly scanned and deciphered, aiding users in making judgments about the potential relevance of the retrieved documents.