[Sigia-l] Information Visualization

[Peter Merholz]

I've been something of a renowned InfoViz crank on this mailing list... 
When I first came across it, it seemed like it had such promise -- but 
then, year after year after year, little if any progress occurs.

I actually don't think the problem is scalability, for two reasons. 1) 
Scalability issues, in terms of bandwidth, database calls, cpu cycles, 
etc. *will* go away. 2) There are many 'smaller scale' info-viz 
applications that don't work.

Pretty much the only successful "consumer oriented" infoviz application 
that comes to mind is SmartMoney's Map of the Market

http://www.smartmoney.com/marketmap/

I had the opportunity to interview Marti Hearst about this for an essay 
I wrote. Marti worked on a lot of infoviz stuff at Xerox PARC, and is 
now a professor at UC Berkeley's SIMS, where she's drifted away from 
InfoViz, and towards things like creating better faceted classification 
browse interfaces. Anyway, you can read the interview here:

http://www.peterme.com/archives/00000233.html

The gist: infoviz doesn't work, by and large, because it's just not 
usable, and it doesn't allow people to accomplish tasks in any better 
way.

--peter