Reaction: The value of Information Visualization

This paper talks about the value of Information Viz its importance and how it can be communicated to others. The initial part of the paper describes the value of Information Visualization or 'InfoVis' as the authors have named it. I was convinced by their argument that visualization has far more impact on humans as compared to statistical data in spreadsheets. In the lectures and also in many day to day examples we can figure it out that pictures or visualizations can catch our eye than plain data in form of rows and columns. I knew this but this paper helped me understand what are the scientific reasons behind it such as more bandwidth for eyes than for auditory system of our body, reduction in search, help recognizing patterns in visualization etc. Some of the examples cited in the paper were already discussed by Dr. Watson in the class like finding the red circle and cholera epidemic example. The later part of the paper talks about the economic aspect of information visualization and I somewhat agree with the authors that this can be used to present the data to the users as compared to plain data.