An Analysis of Information in Visualisation (original) (raw)
An analysis of information visualisation
Synthese, 2012
Philosophers have relied on visual metaphors to analyse ideas and explain their theories at least since Plato. Descartes is famous for his system of axes, and Wittgenstein for his first design of truth table diagrams. Today, visualisation is a form of 'computer-aided seeing' information in data. Hence, information is the fundamental 'currency' exchanged through a visualisation pipeline. In this article, we examine the types of information that may occur at different stages of a general visualization pipeline. We do so from a quantitative and a qualitative perspective. The quantitative analysis is developed on the basis of Shannon's information theory. The qualitative analysis is developed on the basis of Floridi's analysis in the philosophy of information. We then discuss in detail how the condition of the 'data processing inequality' can be broken in a visualisation pipeline. This theoretic finding underlines the usefulness and importance of visualisation in dealing with the increasing problem of data deluge. We show that the subject of visualisation should be studied using both qualitative and quantitative approaches, preferably in an interdisciplinary synergy between information theory and the philosophy of information.
Data, information, and knowledge in visualization
2009
This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible. . Ackoff's definitions of data, information and knowledge in perceptual and cognitive space [1].
The Diagram of Information Visualization
The Parsons Journal for Information Mapping (PJIM), 2012
In the last ten years the area of Information Visualization has witnessed an exponential increase in its popularity. Diagrammatic reasoning and visual epistemology are becoming readily accepted methods of research in many academic domains. Concurrently, information graphics and Infovis have grabbed the attention of a larger mainstream audience. This project communicates the history and development of Information Visualization discipline through an educational piece the audience can physically interact with. The visualized data are the results of an empirical work—the case study of 30 design projects developed in Information Visualization between 2005 and 2011—conducted in collaboration with the Austrian Institute of Technology. The resulting diagram has been transformed in an interactive three dimensional piece as part of an exhibition on diagrammatic reasoning. The piece shows the story of Information Visualization, from past to future. It traces its expansion and features the projects that have had great influence on the discipline. It suggests potential directions where this field may develop in the near future. In the piece, each tin represents a project that participated in the development of Information Visualization. Each tin contains a description of the project, author, data, and a QR code linking the project website. The red circles diameters indicate the relative impact each project had on the field of Information Visualization. The right wall shows the subjects and disciplines where Information Visualization will have great influence in the future. Projects are grouped by subject and distributed chronologically within the groups.
Readings in information visualization: using vision to think
1999
This groundbreaking book defines the emerging field of information visualization and offers the first-ever collection of the classic papers of the discipline, with introductions and analytical discussions of each topic and paper. The authors' intention is to present papers that focus on the use of visualization to discover relationships, using interactive graphics to amplify thought.
Guest editorial: Special issue on information visualisation
Journal of Visual Languages & Computing, 2018
In the current information era, most aspects of life depend on and driven by data, information, knowledge and user experience. The infrastructure of an information-dependent society and drive for new innovation and direction of activities heavily relies on the quality of data, information and analysis of such entities from past to its projected future activities. Information Visualisation, Visual Analytics, Business Intelligence, machine learning and application domains are just a few of the current state of the art developments that effectively enhance understanding of these driving forces. There are several key interdependent determinants emerging that are becoming the focus of scientific activities, such as: raw data (origin, autonomous capture, classification, incompleteness, impurity, filtering), data scale transformation to knowledge acquisition and its dependencies on domain of application. Processing the relationship between these stages, from the raw data to visualisation, has added new impetus to the way these are understood and communicated. Visualisation has been one of the most used methods in presenting data and generating insights [1]. The tradition of use and communication by visualisation is deep rooted and helps us investigate new meanings by application to the humanities, history, art & design, and human factors & user experience studies. Modern day computer assisted analytics and visualisation has added momentum in developing tools that exploit metaphordriven techniques within many applied domains. The techniques are developed beyond visualisation to simplify the complexities, to reveal ambiguity, and to work with incompleteness. The next phase of this evolving field is to understand uncertainty and risk analysis; how this uncertainty is built into the processes that exist in all stages of the process, from raw data to the knowledge acquisition stage.
Aesthetics of information visualization
2011
Right now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there are a great number of artists working on, what could be called, projects of information visualization.“Information visualization,” as a named area of research and development, was originally an outgrowth of the pragmatics of contemporary science and engineering. Faced with huge volumes of data, scientists and engineers write computer programs to render data as images, making it possible to visually search for and scrutinize patterns in the data.
From Wisdom to Data. Philosophical Atlas on Visual Representations of Knowledge
2022
This book collects results from the research project “From Data to Wisdom. Philosophizing Data Visualizations in the Middle Ages and Early Modernity” funded by the FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia), POCI-01-0145-FEDER-029717.1. The project had a double purpose: (1) to create a repository of medieval visualizations of information and knowledge, proposing a distinction between different kinds of representation: relational schemes, knowledge-experience simulations, data (storage/ indices/tables/charts), elemental schemes, text-diagrams, and demonstrative graphics; and (2) to make these visualizations interact with modern and contemporary visualizations, in particular contemporary data visualizations. More generally, the aim of the project was to show how the history of Western thought is not only a history of texts but also (and perhaps increasingly) a history of images and visual representations of concepts and knowledge.
1996
Bibliography: leaves 100-102.Information visualisation uses interactive three-dimensional (3D) graphics to create an immersive environment for the exploration of large amounts of data. Unlike scientific visualisation, where the underlying physical process usually takes place in 3D space, information visualisation deals with purely abstract data. Because abstract data often lacks an intuitive visual representation, selecting an appropriate representation of the data becomes a challenge. As a result, the creation of information visualisation involves as much exploration and investigation as the eventual exploration of that data itself. Unless the user of the data is also the creator of the visualisations, the turnaround time can therefore become prohibitive. In our experience, existing visualisation applications often lack the flexibility required to easily create information visualisations. These solutions do not provide sufficiently flexible and powerful means of both visually repre...
Understanding Visualisation : A Formal Foundation using Category Theory and Semiotics
2011
This article combines the vocabulary of semiotics and category theory to provide a formal analysis of information visualisation. It shows how familiar processes of information visualisation fit the semiotic frameworks of both Saussure and Peirce, and extends these structures using the tools of category theory to provide a general framework for understanding information visualisation in practice, including: relationships between systems, data collected from those systems, renderings of those data in the form of representations, the reading of those representations to create visualisations, and the use of those visualisations to create knowledge and understanding of the system under inspection. The resulting framework is validated by demonstrating how many familiar concepts used in visualisation arise naturally from it; and used to identify some less intuitive distinctions which are useful in comparing visualisation methods. Finally, some suggestions are made regarding further uses to...