Social Life of Visualization

December 7, 2009
Stacey Mason/Mark Bernstein

From November’s OzChi conference, a team from RMIT and Queensland present an interesting presentation of “The Social Life of Visualization.”

The Social Life Of Visualization OzChi Nov 2009
View more presentations from Jeremy Yuille.

With the emphasis on tweakability, the ability to adjust visualizations, Mark Bernstein has some interesting questions.

Is this merely the science-museum trick of giving the user a button to press and a crank to turn?  Or is this a matter of getting the first visualization design in the right ballpark and then letting the user tell you exactly what they want by specifying the details?

While letting the user “playfully explore” the data might be psuedo-interaction, giving the user the ability to annotate or customize visualizations certainly goes beyond the science-museum. The ability to quickly change axes and visual parameters allows for exploration of the data in personal and dynamic ways.

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