Theory

We have received a few good submissions for the InfoVis Theory Workshop at VisWeek, but we're looking for some more. We are therefore opening submissions again, with a new, final deadline: September 13, 2010. If you couldn't make the first deadline, this is your chance.

The first episode of season 4 of Mad Men opens with Don Draper being interviewed by a journalist. He doesn't tell him anything that's of interest and then dodges the question Who is Don Draper? by claiming that he was taught as a child not to talk about himself. Scientists do an equally terrible job at communication, and for many of the same reasons. Cornelia Dean's book Am I Making Myself Clear? offers fascinating insights into both journalism and science, and provides concrete ideas for how to do better.

Information visualization is a very applied field that prides itself on its practical applications and real-world scenarios. Ignoring the theoretical side is dangerous, however, because it limits our ability to distill useful information about the foundations of the field from the practical work being done, and limits our understanding of how and why our own creations work. The goal of this workshop at VisWeek 2010 is to bring together researchers interested in the theoretical aspects of visualization, define the field, discuss ideas and approaches, and get the word out about the importance of theoretical research in information visualization.

Design is usually considered a minor point in visualization. Does it make a difference what color scheme you use (as long as it's not an atrocious one), how thick your lines are, whether you put a background behind your chart, etc.? Caroline Ziemkiewicz and I presented a paper at Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI) where we reported on a study we had performed to find out.

Is visualization art? Are video games art? Is programming art? Is art art? You can discuss these questions at length, but without concrete criteria, they end up being academic exercises rather than leading to some kind of conclusion. One criterion, which I believe to be suited especially well for visualization, is the sublime. Art is sublime, visualization is not. Hence, visualization is not art.

2010 is The Year of Information Visualization Theory. Here's why.

In January, my Ph.D. student Caroline Ziemkiewicz told me about an interesting observation she had made: in different papers comparing tree visualizations, treemaps came out as best, worst, or somewhere in the middle. One difference she noticed was how the questions were worded: when a levels metaphor was used, treemaps did badly; a containment metaphor, on the other hand, seemed to favor treemaps. So we decided to investigate – the result will be presented at InfoVis on Monday, October 20.