Lists of Influences

  • List of Influences: Nigel Holmes

    List of Influences: Nigel Holmes

    Few people have influenced the face of information graphics like Nigel Holmes. I am honored to not only present his very extensive and detailed list of influences here, but also do so on the occasion of his upcoming 70th birthday on June 15, 2012.


  • List of Influences: Ben Shneiderman

    Ben Shneiderman’s name has been with me through my entire computing life. In high school, we used to draw Nassi-Shneiderman diagrams to understand structured programming. In the HCI course at my university, his name was on the papers and book chapters we read. When I got into information visualization, he was still everywhere, with treemaps, […]


  • List of Influences: Jock Mackinlay

    Jock D. Mackinlay was working on information visualization long before the field or the term even existed. His Ph.D. thesis on the automatic visual representation of data translated Bertin’s semiological texts into a useful piece of software (and badly-needed visualization theory). His work also includes Cone Trees, the Perspective Wall, an analysis of the visualization design space, as well as the Readings in Information Visualization (together with Stuart Card and Ben Shneiderman). Mackinlay worked at PARC from 1986 to 2004, when he joined Tableau Software – a company based on a Ph.D. thesis inspired by his work 15 years earlier.