Viegas & Wattenberg HCI 2007
Summary
In this paper, Viegas and Wattenberg argue for the incorporation of perspective in creating information visualizations. Traditionally, analytical visualization tools have been designed to minimize distortion; to remove the point of view of the designer so that the visualization can offer an objective view of the data to the user and leave them to make their own conclusions. They suggest instead that designers should seek to incorporate particular perspectives on data sets if such a perspective makes the visualization more appropriate to a given task, and then extend that by saying that in some cases, we must acknowledge that the goal of a visualization is not only to analyze, but to persuade: "there are often valid reasons to want to change the way people think and it may be that much of the value of visualization comes from its ability to change attitudes" (p. 10).
The authors give support of how visualizations can play this role by drawing examples from the relatively recent advent of artistic data visualization. With the growth of the Internet, data of all kinds (economic, social networking, demographic, etc.), have become accessible to individual citizens. Similarly, the availability of cheap, powerful computers and powerful programming languages and visualization software has but the ability to analyze and visualize that data into the hands of those same citizens.
Artists have capitalized on these events to build interactive artworks which use data visualization to illuminate social or other issues. The artists discussed in the paper are:
Angesleva, J, and Cooper, R.: Last Clock
Josh On: They Rule
Jason Salavon: Homes For Sale, Class of 1967, Class of 1988, Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades (normalized), The Top Grossing Film of All Time, 1 x 1. See The Salavon Studio
Issues
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