What is Information Visualization?

Enrico Bertini
enrico.bertini@nyu.edu
NYU Tandon School of Engineering
https://tandoninfovisfall16.sl
ack.com/signup
 WHAT
is Information Visualization?
(interactive) visual representation of information
to help people make sense of complex
phenomena through data.
Data ...
Aid Data
http://aiddata.herokuapp.com/
With Ilya Boyandin
http://polygraph.cool/films/
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/06/05/upshot/how-the-recession-reshaped-the-economy-in-255-charts.html
http://texttile.io/
Applications

Techniques

Narratives
 WHY
Information Visualization?
Data Everywhere!
How do we turn all this information into
knowledge?
 and how to we communicate it in a way that
people can understand complex issues?
 Opportunity
+
Responsibility
 but why use Visualization?
Human Eyes Have Superpowers!
Visual Reasoning Is Way Faster and More
Reliable Than Mental Reasoning.

External Cognition.
Lets Play a Game! The Game of 15

RULES

1) There are 2 players

2) Each player takes a digit in turn

3) Once a digit is taken, it cannot be used by any of the players again

4) The first player to get three digits that sum to 15 wins

{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9}
Example taken from Prof. Pat
Hanrahans EuroVis09 keynote talk.
Tic-Tac-Toe: Herbert Simons Problem Isomorph

4 9 2

3 5 7

8 1 6
Visualization allows us to summarize
information while retaining details ...
... as such it can reveal information that
summary statistics may hide.
Anscombes Quartet
Visualization can be faster than your
eyes can move!
 Preattentive Processing

Preattentive features can be detected faster

than eye movement (200 msec).
 HOW
do you learn Information Visualization?
Data
Data abstraction and processing.

VISUAL
Mapping Perception
DATA REPRESENTA
TION
Visual Representation
Visual variables, marks
and channels. Their
best use and
limitations.

VISUAL
Mapping Perception
DATA REPRESENTA
TION
Visual Mapping
How to best map data
features to visual features.

What options are available

(visualization toolbox).

How computer algorithms

realize the mapping and turn
data into images.

Visual
Mapping VISUAL
Perception
DATA REPRESENTA
TION
Perception &
Visual Thinking
How we perceive visual
information and
process it to solve
problems.

Perception
&
Visual
Visual Mapping
VISUAL Thinking
DATA REPRESENTA
TION
Interaction &
UI Design
How we can make
visualization interactive
and enable complex
sense making
processes.

Visual Mapping
VISUAL Perception &
Visual Thinking
DATA REPRESENTA
TION
Effective Visualization
The extent to which it helps people carry out some data
analysis or communication tasks better.

Better? Faster, more accurately, increased confidence,

more insights, better decisions, etc.

It can be measured only in relation to these tasks and

goals.
Visualization Design Space
Why Study Information
Visualization?
Data Data Everywhere!
"The ability to take data - to be able to
understand it, to process it, to extract value
from it, to visualize it, to communicate it's
going to be a hugely important skill in the next
decades. Because now we really do have
essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the
complimentary scarce factor is the ability to
understand that data and extract value from
it."

Hal Varian, Chief Economist of Google

(see the article here:
http://bit.ly/varian-sexy-job)
Everyone is increasingly making decisions based on
data ... lots of data!

Biologists, Doctors, Social Scientists, Policy Makers,

Business Analysts, Marketers, Security Analysts,
Climatologists, Historians, Yourself!, Etc ...

These people are not trained data geeks. And they need to
make sense of their data and communicate their findings.
Related areas ...
Statistics
Cartography
Machine Learning
Databases
Human-Computer Interaction
Data Journalism / Storytelling
Visualization can make complex
problems trivial.
Data
Abortion Rates By Age in the US

Which group has the highest/lowest rates?

Which group has an increasing / decreasing / flat / bumpy / etc. temporal

trend?

Which group has a faster/slower rate of change?

Visual Representation

Taken from Jorge Camoes / Excelcharts

http://www.excelcharts.com/blog/chart-de
sign-abortion-ratios-1980-2003/
But only if used properly!
Example taken from: Junk Charts: Expanding circles of error
Some are plain wrong!