[Sigia-l] Information Visualization

[stephanie hornung]

i actually took marti's infoviz class in spring 2002 (which peter links to
from his article) and found that, like many thing, infoviz was thought to
be a panacea for a problem (i.e. dealing with large multivariate
datasets), and when it wasn't immediately successful, it was abandoned to
some degree.  but i think that it has its place and can help with some
problems, though certainly not most problems.

there are some apps out there that work well, such as spotfire (which i
think someone mentioned), tablelens (from inxight
http://www.tablelens.com/) and polaris
(http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/polaris/).  the gnutella project from
a previous years infoviz class is also quite amazing
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~rachna/courses/infoviz/gtv/

stephanie

Peter Merholz said:
> 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
>
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