Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Reaction: The Value of Information Visualization

The paper argues whether information visualizations are useful for the end user or not in comparison to other well known mediums. According to the authors, it’s difficult to evaluate the role of InfoVis, however, they are useful when a person wants to ask more meaningful questions about the data and sometimes these visualizations may also act as one important exploratory aid.

By citing number of examples, author clearly concludes that Information Visualizations are useful. However, I feel that we can mostly empirically determine if the visualization will be helpful for certain set of people. For a Biology major, Statistical representation of Visualization may not be that convincing. Hence, probably that is the reason why author thinks that communicating the value of the visualization is an important challenge for InfoVis researchers.

It’d be an interesting research to define set of rules which can discretely quantify the value of visualization against other mediums.

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