Reading 9: Interaction

by Mike Gleicher on February 5, 2017

Due Date: Monday, March 13th, preferably before class (assignment)

So far, we have focused on discussing static visualizations. Now, we’ll start to talk about interaction. But, in order to do so, we’ll need to get some vocabulary to describe the many different types of interactions that are useful in Vis.

Heer and Schneiderman (web version) give a nice start. The draft of Munzner’s book had a differently nice one, but it got re-organized and spread out in the final book (into Chapters 11-13). We’ll save Chapter 13 for later.

  • Heer and Schneiderman. Interactive Dynamics for Visual Analysis.
    The “official” version was in the Communications of the ACM (CACM). (link to PDF)
    You can use the official link if you are on campus or use the library’s proxy server
    The “ACM Queue” (a magazine published by ACM) has an online version.
  • Munzner, Chapter 11 (link)
  • Munzner, Chapter 12 (link) – note this isn’t as specific to interaction, but I’m not sure where else it fits into the class.

Reading about interaction is just a start. Really, the best thing to do is to try out lots of interactions and get a sense of what they do and not do. So, for this reason, I am not going to load up on readings. Go play with some interactive visualizations and see how they help address visualization challenges.

But, as an optional reading, I recommend:

  • Lam, H. (2008). A Framework of Interaction Costs in Information Visualization. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 14(6), 1149–1156. http://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2008.109. (pdf link to Heidi’s page)

because it gets at the downsides of using interaction. I will be using this to frame the lecture in class.

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