Mick McQuaid

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)

Last week, someone in class mentioned that people are more likely to accept nonsensical conclusions if supported by attractive visualizations. In response, I mentioned a book by R”udiger Pohl, Cognitive Illusions, Psychology Press, 2004. I claimed that this was a separate topic from establishing definitions about information graphics. I looked at the book (you can see this part of it as a Google Books preview, and found a complementary case where external cognition (called external representation there) facilitates reasoning. It seems worthwhile to share it. (more…)