Infovis for the social: a way to explore contents and data in social topics

Information Communication Technology (ICT) has radically changed everyday life, and also changed fields like business, production and distribution, services and social relationships. The first result of this phenomenon is the changing role of the technological network is now central in the relationship creation. In a world where everything is connected, it is essential to understand and make use of the data produced. On one hand we are dealing with a quantitative aspect, on the other hand it is important to find and bring out the qualitative aspect of these data and their possible social impacts. The ability to understand, convey, and give sense to the data is rapidly becoming a potential value.This context includes the field of information visualization (infovis), that we see as a complex multidisciplinary field. In this paper, we present a way for visualizing online discussions related to social and civil values and we show how infovis can be not only a communication tool but also an information tool, turning itself into a functional interface enabling insights and research.