Papers

Papers contains snack-sized discussions of papers and other things I’ve read - I’ll try to give you the main points so you can decide if you want to read them yourself.

We often think of interaction as a solution to visualization problems as it has many upsides. However, there are costs to the user (beyond the obvious costs in terms of design, implementation and deployment). The paper “A Framework of Interaction Costs in Information Visualization” by Heidi Lam gives a nice way to think about these costs. It’s an adaptation of earlier work in HCI, but she shows how appropriate it is. She validates the framework by applying it in a broad survey of visualization papers.

Many (if not all) visualizations are about making comparisons in the data. I’ve spent a lot of effort to come up with ways of thinking about comparisons, or (if you prefer) to think about visualization in terms of comparison. These were summarized in a 2017 paper (it has a 2018 publication data) “Considerations for Visualizing Comparison”.

The paper gives a “process” for developing a visualization in terms of comparison: first identify what the comparison problem is, figure out what the abstract comparative challenge is (number of items, size of items, complexity of relationships), choose a scalability strategy to address the challenge (scan sequentially, select subset, summarize somehow), and choose a comparative design (juxtaposition, superposition, explicit encoding). I call these last 3 the “three threes” and they give a categorization of comparative challenges and strategies.