A guide to fundamental issues in designing interactive visualizations,
exploring ideas of inquiry, design, structured data, and usability.
Interactive visualization is emerging as a vibrant new form of
communication, providing compelling presentations that allow viewers to
interact directly with information in order to construct their own
understandings of it. Building on a long tradition of print-based
information visualization, interactive visualization utilizes the
technological capabilities of computers, the Internet, and computer
graphics to marshal multifaceted information in the service of making a
point visually. This book offers an introduction to the field,
presenting a framework for exploring historical, theoretical, and
practical issues. It is not a "how-to" book tied to specific and
soon-to-be-outdated software tools, but a guide to the concepts that are
central to building interactive visualization projects whatever their
ultimate form.
The framework the book presents (known as the ASSERT model, developed by
the author), allows the reader to explore the process of interactive
visualization in terms of choosing good questions to ask; finding
appropriate data for answering them; structuring that information;
exploring and analyzing the data; representing the data visually; and
telling a story using the data. Interactive visualization draws on many
disciplines to inform the final representation, and the book reflects
this, covering basic principles of inquiry, data structuring,
information design, statistics, cognitive theory, usability, working
with spreadsheets, the Internet, and storytelling.
