The Magic Science of Visualization

The visualization of information is in many respects back in the stone age, or rather the text age. WIMP GUIs just place more text on the screen and search engines use their graphic bandwidth to display advertisements, but don’t help us to assimilate information faster. The snazzy engines tend to present 1D clusters in text (e.g. vivisimo.com) or add expensive 3D representations to display the traditional ten hits without their summaries (e.g. kartoo.com). In this paper we review a variety of information visualization interfaces and examine the discrepancy between the techniques used and our cognitive abilities to process visual information. We introduce a number of psychophysiologically motivated dimensions and present our analysis of how using them can speed our ability to assimilate and sift information.