Seadragon technology is cool, but to any InfoVis connoisseur, the concept or design of Pivot isn’t really ground-breaking. Two major problems need to be resolved before InfoVis systems can become “killer apps”. First, what benefits does a zoomable, filterable, pivotable, info-graphical interface provide in comparison to text-based interfaces? “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts” is certainly a good formulation, but we need more concrete scenarios and real-world applications. Second, an implicit assumption of most InfoVis systems is that users have some ready-to-be-visualized datasets, and this assumption is building on a less solid ground. Unstructured data is everywhere, and getting them cleaned up and usable is a huge problem. Pivot provides tools for voluntary developers to create collections , which are data in a format understood by Pivot. This approach is reasonable, but may not be enough.

An interesting talk, but the main idea is not new. Gibson has rejected 20+ years ago the idea that vision is simplest when the eyes are fixed as if they are a camera taking a static snapshot to be transmitted to the brain. Visual information does not arrive at the eyes in the form of discrete packets of impoverished stimuli that must be further processed, instead, motion reveals persistent and transient structures in the ambient light - information that can be directly picked up with the senses as a perceptual system. “The activity being what occurs in the brain when the inputs get there. That was not what I meant by a perceptual system. I meant the activities of looking, listening, touching, tasting, or sniffing.” (Gibson, 1979, p.244)

This formulation is extended by the enactive approach to visual perception (Noë, 2004), which argues perception is not what happens in us, but something we do. The end product of perception, if there’s any, is our perceptual experience determined by what we do, not a computational output in the form of a linguistic token. This of course does not mean the brain is irrelevant, but it certainly rejects the idea that there’s something in the brain that is a percept or image or 2D/3D model of the world.

I gave a tutorial on four popular graphics/visualization toolkits (Prefuse, Flare, Processing and Protovis) in John’s InfoVis class today. Each of the tools, while enabling and facilitating the design and construction of visual interfaces in certain dimensions, imposes limitations and constraints on others. The greatest strength of Prefuse and Flare is that you can achieve a whole lot (layout, animation, visual mapping) with just a few lines of code, but the benefits provided by these sophisticated tool-kits with complex architecture can soon diminish when your data deviates from the standard format or contains invalid entries, or your design has unique features that cannot be done using the existing classes. I once tried to import some data files into Flare using the built-in functionality and failed. Soon I realized that to find out what went wrong, there is no escape from dealing with low-level details. What’s worse is that you need to understand and fit your mental model into the toolkits’ architecture — not fun at all. In this regard, I would gladly use Processing and Protovis. They provide an appropriate level of abstraction that gives me control over fine-grained interface features. The prototyping environments (PDE for Processing and sandbox for protovis) are great for fast and easy scripting.

Another thought is about the greater ecosystem. Processing has done pretty well in creating a conducive ecosystem where the authors maintain good documentation and tutorials for learners, hence fostering an active and growing user community which in turn can contribute a lot to the development of the toolkit. Prefuse stopped at beta release, and Flare stayed at version alpha (for now). Hopefully Protovis can do better.

ESRI press is finally releasing a reprint of Jacque Bertin’s classic, Semiology of Graphics. It has been difficult for visual designers and researchers to get hold of a copy of the book: you either have to pay a ridiculous price ($300-500) to buy it as a “scarce resource” or to fight with your colleagues for a single copy archived at your school library. A running thread on Ask E.T. that started in 2003 shows how desperate many people are in trying to get this book.

ESRI Catalog 2010