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

The paper explains in depth understanding of what interaction is and how interaction is perceived in information visualization. The aggregation of interaction techniques based on the user intent helps in identifying similar existing techniques so that the user interaction can be analyzed well. The division of the interaction techniques as independent techniques is difficult because in most cases while extracting information from a visualization, each technique would be preceded by one or more other interaction methods before reaching the desired results.

The select technique helps in identifying points of user interest within any visualization, but exploration is where we get the actual results. So, I think select and explore as two separate techniques are misleading and only explore can do the work when select is made an implicit task within exploration. The use of abstract/elaborate,encode and connect is like creating a new visualization using interaction which helps in better understanding of the visualization and needs to be present along with representation to improve the user cognition. I think interaction should be an integral part of visualizations along with representation as with the technology we have today, interactive visualizations make more sense and add value to the representation.