Visualization and HCI: A brief survey

The concept of visualization essentially refers to the use of visual or graphical techniques for presenting information. In computing, there is typically also a connotation of large amounts of information being presented in a more compact way through the mapping to visual dimensions. Visualization in computing is a large, rapidly growing and heterogeneous field and this presentation is not aimed at providing a complete survey. Rather, I concentrate of the subfield that I find most appropriate for the Supreme project: interactive visualizations of abstract data. This means that topics such as scientific visualization, where much of the work concerns non-interactive visualization of large sets of concrete data, are disregarded. I have mainly used literature from the field of human-computer interaction (HCI), where the interest in visualization to support knowledge work is considerable.