VisQAC: Visual Analytics for Online Q&A Communities

Online question and answer (Q&A) communities, which allow users to exchange knowledge by asking and answering questions, have become increasingly popular. As a result of user active participation, these communities store overwhelming volumes of information. However, existing related methods are unable to meet community operators' needs for analyzing multi-dimensional Q&A sequences and understanding user behavior. In this paper, collaborating with domain experts in online community,we present a system, VisQAC, which explores the patterns of Q&A sequence and user behavior. In the system,a novel visual design is proposed, which is combined with flexible mapping measures for analyzing critical characteristics of sequence data. Moreover, a timeline visualization method is designed to visualize data with categorical attributes and its correlation can be displayed flexibly by choosing time mode and time granularity. The usefulness and effectiveness of the system are demonstrated with several case studies of VisQAC with community operators based on the Zhihu dataset. Our evaluation shows that VisQAC is beneficial to the understanding of Q&A sequence and associated user behavior.