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From Information Visualization to Sensemaking:
Connecting the Mind's Eye to the Mind's Muscles
Stuart Card, PARC
Looking back on the tenth anniversary of the first Symposium on Information Visualization,
much has been accomplished. The computer's power has been exploited to give quick
visual form to abstract data, to interact, and to warp detail to follow the user's
changing interest. Moreover, the design space of visualizations has been systematized
with reference models, taxonomies, and monographs relating visualization to perceptual
and graphical constraints. Looking ahead, however, I will argue that the era
of pure information visualization is over. The path ahead depends on giving much
more attention to the purposes of visualization and its use. Leaving aside communication,
the purpose of information visualization is insight, or more particularly, a
larger process that might be called sensemaking. I will sketch out the nature
of sensemaking, exemplify it empirically in a practical, urgent setting, and
suggest how theories of sensemaking could be developed. I will then describe
systems that subsume information visualization as part of an emerging class of
sensemaking systems combining visualization (the mind's eye) with semantic content
analysis and sensemaking operations (the mind's muscle). Not surprisingly, a
focus on sensemaking is a good generator of new visualizations. But these developments
also suggest that it may be time for the information visualization field to alter
its boundaries to go beyond the merely visual. |
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