Giving Shape to Words: Visual Knowledge Discovery for Textual Contents in Legal Scenarios

Visual Knowledge Discovery (VKD), the emerging research field exploring the integration between Artificial Intelligence and Visual Analytics is impacting a growing number of contexts. This paper dwells on the potential intersections between the VKD perspective and the legal world, a scenario for many reasons drawn by the idea of combining empirical insights offered by computation with intuitive, visually-enhanced forms of data mining. We will focus on criminal justice, taking the cue from an ongoing experimental research project that investigates novel applications of computational social science methods - complex network analysis - to analyze criminal organizations for both scientific and investigative purposes. The work will describe the VKD solutions devised to allow public prosecutors to visually browse the content of phone calls and environmental tapping gathered during preliminary inquiries. We will discuss how given visualizations - graph-based visualizations in the first place - can enhance text mining techniques helping to capture in-a-glance communication flows, discussions' topics and both structural and functional features of criminal networks at hand.