Visualizing Sixteen Years of Data About Portuguese Leisure-Cultural Activities

According to Ward (1995) visualization is the graphical presentation of information, and its goal is to provide to the viewer with a qualitative understanding of the information contents. That information may be data, processes, relations or concepts. An expressive and effective visualization (Mackinlay, 1986) may use multiple techniques that can also be interactive. Information visualization has been successfully used in several domains, helping people to have a better insight of the data. The great challenge is always to map and to convey information properly according to the data visualization goals and to the potential end-users cognitive demands. In a high tech society people are expected to prefer the quick consumption of things with little time to seize them. The aim of this project is to understand to what extent cultural leisure is important in people’s everyday lives. We want to know what traits of society it can reveal and what causes and consequences can be reported and even associated to the numbers presented in the time series. Our goal is also to implement a prototype that depicts the Portuguese leisure-time trend along sixteen years, and to evaluate it. Because the data volume ABSTRACT