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

Author point out the two core components of Infovis: "representation" and "interactiion". He argues that the focus has always been on the former and interaction is often not giving the same amount of time and research as representation. This paper mainly focuses on the "iteraction" aspect of infovis , by first identifying the fundamental ways in which the users can interact and benefit from it. Then looking back into the work that has already been done in this regard and provide analysis of the way in which research is done with respect to "interaction". The author comes with an notion of category based on the user intent. "select","explore" etc which are taken into detail and explained with an example and a picture. Also one of the examples shown in the class "visual thesarus" is explained in "Explore" category. The categories serve as a good classification , however which might not be adequate. The fact that interaction is as important as representation is the most important thing to take away from this paper.