Reaction: The Value of Information Visualization

This paper addresses the question of:

- What is the Value of Information Visualization (InfoVis)?

- How can we measure value in InfoVis?

- Why identifying the value of InfoVis is difficult?

- Why InfoVis is challenging to evaluate?

- How InfoVis is useful?

Other fields can measure the value of their research in a "simple" way, but how can we measure value in InfoVis?

Amplify cognition is the key to answer the question on how to measure value in InfoVis. But the problem arises since InfoVis is used as a preliminary step to sake questions about the data, or as an exploratory process when we have large quantities of data.

Since InfoVis is a field that allows us to get insights from data, then how do we measure insight? The papers explains how a visualization can amplify cognition by allowing humans to answers questions quickly that it would be very difficult to answer without a visualization.

I liked the idea that in order to show the value of a visualization, a good example should answer all the questions that the users had, and also give additional benefits (for example, questions they didn't know they had).

I agree with the point that Visualization and Data Mining techniques should be combined in order to get more insights to the data. Sometimes we can use Visualization as an exploratory step when we have large quantities of data, or we can use visualization in order to show our findings in an easy way.