Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Reaction: Automating the Design of Graphical Presentations of Relational Information

I thought the paper is more difficult to understand and longer to read than the other paper, especially when it talked about the expressiveness and effectiveness criteria.

It was interesting to see so many related works as this paper was published in 1986. There were over 900 citations and I was able to figure out that it is a classic paper regarding to graphical presentations. However, some of the positions of the caption made it confusing to find the figure. (figure 8, figure 17)

Regarding to the bar chart example, I agree that given the data, it is crucial to find the correct representation and avoid cases like figure 11. In addition, it is useful to know that the accuracy ranking of quantitative perceptual task follows as position, length, angle/slop, area, volume, and color/density in order. I was able to understand why I liked figure 5 rather than figure 13. Figure 5 used position while figure 13 used area to encode the price value.

Figure 19 notes the position of advanced database class scheduled before its prerequisite but I wonder why "Adv DB" is at winter instead of spring or fall. Is "Winter 86" a typo instead of "Winter 85"?

I think the table of expressiveness of retinal techniques (figure 25) would help to decide which attribute to choose when the user knows the characteristic of the data (nominal/ordinal/quantitative). Also, figure 30 is a nice example of the final result using APT(A Presentation Tool) which appropriately used the attributes of position, color, and size to visualize the data. However, the purple color of the weight is confusing and would have been better to leave it blank to emphasize the size of the circle.

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