Multidimensional scaling for group memory visualization

We describe an attempt to overcome information overload through information visualization — in a particular domain, group memory. A brief review of information visualization is followed by a brief description of our methodology. We discuss our system, which uses multidimensional scaling (MDS) to visualize relationships between documents, and which we tested on 60 subjects, mostly students. We found three important (and statistically significant) differences between task performance on an MDS-generated display and on a randomly generated display. With some qualifications, we conclude that MDS speeds up and improves the quality of manual classification of documents and that the MDS display agrees with subject perceptions of which documents are similar and should be displayed together.