Social Media Island: Interactive User Profiling and Information Diffusion Exploration with 3D Visual Metaphors
Jinjing Jiang, Yuheng Zhao, Jun-Hsiang Yao, Hui‐Ting Wang, Xuexi Wang, Lana Blue, Chen Guo, Xudong Li, Siming Chen · 2025
Understanding user profiling on social media poses significant challenges due to the intertwined complexities of network structures, user interactions, and the multi-dimensional nature of the data. To reduce visual clutter and offer complementary perspectives for engagingly exploring user profiling within these networks, we propose Social Media Island, an interactive 3D metaphoric visualization system. Our system uses 3D mountain metaphors to visualize user profiling, capturing user influence and activity, while tree metaphors visualize the information forwarding process. To support a flexible scope for users to explore in a more intriguing way, we design various interactions such as cutting the mountain to split out a subset with similarity to some extent for further exploration. By using these 3D visualizations with user interactions, Social Media Island facilitates immersion in the data, the fluid exploration of user influence, topic evolution, and the spread of information. The effectiveness of metaphors is evaluated by user studies, and that of the system is evaluated through two case studies.