One Picture to Study One Thousand Words: Visualization for Qualitative Research in the Age of Digitalization

In this article, we argue for further advancing qualitative research methods by creating tools to investigate digital traces of digital phenomena. We specifically focus on large-scale textual data sets and show how interactive visualization can be used to augment qualitative researchers’ capabilities to theorize from trace data. We ground our approach on prior work in sensemaking, visual analytics, and interactive visualization (Munzner 2014; Russell et al. 1993) and show how tasks enabled by visualization systems can be synergistically integrated with the qualitative research process. Finally, we apply these principles with several open-source text mining and interactive visualization systems. We hope that this articlestimulates further interest and provides specific guidelines for developing and expanding the repertoire of open-source systems for qualitative research.