Mick McQuaid

Zipdecode by Ben Fry (picture links to app's site)

I claimed previously that InfoViz history spans two eras, a Big era and a Populist era. If that is so, the prominent tools should reflect this difference. In a way, it does. Prominent, talked-about tools have changed. Spotfire and Inxight are underrepresented today, for reasons that have to do with the ownership of the data they’re used to visualize, as well as because of the social relations of the people involved in their communities. These Big systems are not designed for growth in the userbase. (more…)

I mentioned Spotfire and Inxight, InfoViz tools that have enjoyed commercial success over many years and that were the product of an era when only those with access to Silicon Graphics workstations. InfoViz was exclusively the province of those who could forge partnerships between software engineers and cognitive psychologists.

http://www.inxightfedsys.com/pdfs/VizServer_Finalweb.pdf shows the three main information representations associated with Inxight, the hyperbolic browser, shown as StarTree in the brochure, Table Lens, and the perspective wall, shown as TimeWall in the brochure. (more…)

I’ve shared my view that the history of InfoViz can be divided into two eras, the Big Viz era and the Populist Viz era.  This distinction helps me to think about which changes over time are most important and where social and technical aspects of change meet.  So I want to mention papers about the two most prominent tools from the Big Viz era still in commercial use today, Spotfire and Inxight, and I’d like to contrast them with some other tools more closely associated with the Populist Viz era, although some of these tools existed long before they were associated with InfoViz.

Two InfoViz Eras (picture links to 50MB presentation)