Abstract
Clarifies what is meant by ‘information visualization’ by considering an everyday activity: that of finding a house to buy. The important point is made that visualization – the formation of a mental model of something – is an activity carried out by a human being, not a computer, notwithstanding the hugely beneficial support that computation can bring.
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Notes
- 1.
As Bill Bryson (1998) remarks, “Beck realized that when you are underground it doesn’t matter where you are”.
- 2.
One hopes that Minard’s map was not intended as a recruitment poster!
- 3.
Low death rates in the area containing a brewery have led to speculation about the liquids consumed in that region.
- 4.
The letters v-i-s-u-a-l in visualization can be misleading. Data can be encoded in sound, touch and smell as well as images with a view to leading to a mental model.
- 5.
The task of encoding data in a picture is not only faced, for example, in the design of a web page, but in many other activities such as the production of a church newsletter or a school pamphlet.
- 6.
An optimization algorithm is designed to enhance some property of a system by making appropriate adjustments to the values of that system’s components.
- 7.
A problem with autonomous optimization is that the reason why its outcome is better, and what limiting relationships (e.g., trade-offs) might have been encountered during the process, is not visible to a user. Readers of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will recall the answer ‘42’ provided by the computer when asked “what is the secret of Life, the Universe and Everything?”
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Exercises
Exercises
1.1.1 Exercise 1.1
Without consulting the chapter you have just read, sketch what you can remember of Minard’s record, Nightingale’s diagram and Snow’s Soho map. In other words, externalize your mental models of those representations.
1.1.2 Exercise 1.2
In the course of a normal day, make notes of examples in which data is represented visually, aurally or by tactile means. Afterwards, identify whether, for each example, the data has value (numeric, ordinal or categorical) or is a relation.
1.1.3 Exercise 1.3
By means of sketches explore alternative ways of representing the data encoded in the representations of Minard, Nightingale, Snow and Beck.
1.1.4 Exercise 1.4
Select a physical object (e.g., a car, yourself, a house) and identify some of its attributes that can usefully be represented visually. Sketch a possible visual representation of that object.
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Spence, R. (2014). Introduction. In: Information Visualization. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07341-5_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07341-5_1
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