Sunday, September 18, 2011

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

The paper starts with two fundamental aspects of info vis Representation and interaction.  Even though they appear to be independent they are closely related as interactions can change the representations.

Since the author found that recently more attention to representation is given , they have concentrated more on interaction. Interaction is not a tangible concept its a feature that provide users with the ability to directly or indirectly manipulate and interpret representations.

Methods followed : researched on existing taxonomies, commercial information systems, articles, well-known papers. They tried to group them based on the taxonomies but were not successful as there were lot of information , so turned to what users achieve by the interaction and this gave 7 categories namely Select, Explore, Reconfigure, Encode, Abstract/ Elaborate, Filter, Connect. The way they have categorized  these 7 are very interesting to read as they have given some very good examples like name voyager  to understand their finding.

After reading the paper, felt like the authors have done a good justice on putting forward the importance of interaction in infovis. The detailed study conducted by them reveals that HCI is a very challenging field and more research on this field would obviously improve the visualizations.

0 comments: