Principles for Visualisation
Information Visualisation
The power of information visualization (infovis) lies in human abilites of fast comprehension of images rather than text. This is an ability of humans developed through evolution where interpretation and awairness of what we see in nature play the greatest role. As Colin Ware (2004) states, we can think of the environment that we see as an image. Our cognitive abilities are developed through seeing with the eyes and thats why we are so good at interpreting, detecting and following occurances in our environment, and accordingly in images.
This ability also addresses the skill of fast detecting the motion of objects, connectivity between objects, things that pop-out from the environment, pattern recognition, color detection and many others. All which can be used to create good visualization tools.
Is this to say text is obsolete in infovis? No, anyone who works with graphic layout or presenting information knows that text is of great importans. But the cognitive process of going through a body of text to get information and viewing an image to understand something is quite different. Where the text is quite abstract and leaves much for the reader to imagine the meaning of the content images can give a more concrete idea of what the text sais, e.g. supporting the text. The opposite is also true.
The aim for infovis systems is to support users information seeking through large body of data by using methods based on knowledge of human cognition and visual abilities. By information seeking I mean not only seeking one item, but to seek to understand something through the data; or find something new by connecting different data values in new ways creating patterns of data; or to understand sequences of occurence that is more akward to understand by still images or by text only.
