Reaction: Toward a Deeper Understanding of the Role of Interaction in Information Visualization

This paper begins with a striking note on the importance given to representation and not interaction in the field of InfoVis. The authors have stressed upon the relevance of both the fields equally in the science of InfoVis. Thus the need to define and explore the context of interaction in Infovis is considered as the goal in this paper. The authors in this paper have defined clarity in terms of the scope of their work and have clearly put forth the structure and expectations from the paper.

Moving further in this paper, I like the fact that the authors have considered even the operations performed on the static images as interaction. They have a comprehensive attempt to define the concept of interaction. The taxonomies discussed here are also indicating all the aspects or extent of interactions involved between the users and data. The authors have indeed surveyed extensively covering 59 papers, 51 systems and 311 techniques to come up with the template of methods in interaction. Based on the user notion and research, the authors have come up with seven interaction techniques which include select, explore, reconfigure, encode, abstract, filter and connect. The authors have further discussed elaborately on each technique and have illustrated them quite well. They also discussed in depth about issues with each of the technique. Thus in this paper the authors have come up with a novel user-based interaction techniques which will definitely prove to be useful in the field of interaction in InfoVis.