tree visualizations

I did a little exploratory reading on tree visualizations, from Ben Schneiderman's original treemap to more advanced ones, like voronoi maps and jigsaw maps.

Operator interaction framework for visualization systems

After not using my blog for a while, I decided to get back into it. The paper that motivated me was Ed Huai-hsin Chi's paper, "An Operator Interaction framework for visualization systems". It is an excellent paper that seems to bring visualization and HCI (human-computer interaction) closer together by bridging Norman's "gulf of execution", where users may not understand the actual semantics of the operations they use. they use the example of selecting data for display. Is the data selection to be updated on all displays (ie, value modification) or does the data selection modify only the display in which it was performed in (ie, view modification). From the basic view/value distinction, they go on to make a taxonomy of operations that are used in visualization, extending previous work to make the visualization more interactive. They also put the different operations in a pipeline-like state machine (in contrast to prior approaches where the representation is more of a flow chart, ie, in the paper they propose the nodes to represent states of the data, rather than processing elements. The rest of the paper goes through many examples.