Prior to establishing Spy I had worked for New
Jersey Senator Bill Bradley on his 1984 re-election campaign before
studying Law at the London School of Economics. I began working in
electronic publishing in the US when I got a summer job working on
a small newsletter in Georgetown, Washington DC. I had gone there to
intern on Capitol Hill.
Phone number can be found on BT electronic directory enquiries using details above
As well as the Acrobat facsimile you can find article on the Eye Web site, though without illustrations. Footnotes, References, and Corrections and clarifications follow.
Footnotes
1. The Mercator map, centred around the Greenwich Meridian, shaped many people’s view of the world for centuries. However the device by which it facilitated navigation lead to mis-representations of the surface area and locations of countries: Africa appeared smaller than it is, and Britain nearer the equator. In the 1960s geographer Arno Peters created a map, the Peter’s Projection, in which each country’s surface area was accurately represented – with surprising results. His projection became a totem for those who resented the domination of the ‘South’ by the ‘North’. In fact each projection is equally useful, depending on what you want to know, do, or communicate. As the saying has it: the map is not the territory. See also the British Library’s exhibition ‘Lie of the Land: The Secret Life of Maps’ 27 July 2001 – 7 April 2002
2. US-based UK émigré and author of Information Visualization: Perception for Design (Morgan Kaufman, 2000)
3. Richard Saul Wurman is one of the most effective proponents of information design and visualization. He created the pioneering Access map series. More recently he edited Information Architects (Graphis Press, 1996), profiling information designer working in digital media. For the turn of the millennium he conceived the Understanding USA project, in which leading information designers were invited to visualize diverse aspects of US society based on current statistics.
4. Stu Card, Jock Mackinlay and Ben Shneiderman co-edited Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think (Morgan Kaufmann, 1999), a collection of papers that present the founding research for the field of information visualisation. The extensive introduction presents a thorough overview of the field of information visualisation, but this book is really aimed at researchers, people pursuing study or practicing in this field.
More recently Shneiderman co-authored The Craft of Information Visualization: Readings and Reflections (Morgan Kaufmann, 2003), which reviews the evolution of 38 ideas and innovations from University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab, which lead to products including Spotfire and ‘Map of the Market’.
References
Projects, tools and organisations mentioned.
Ben Fry’s Web site documents his work at the MIT Media Lab. Please contact him if you would like to use any of his images.
AT&T Information Visualization Research Group, based in Florham Park, NJ
Spotfire, originally developed at the University of Maryland HCI Lab
Projekttriangle company Web site
Visual I|O company Web site
Grokker from Groxis
SmartMoney magazine’s ‘Map of the Markets’
Edwards Churcher company Web site
TextArc can be found at www.TextArc.org
Articles and definitions
Articles drawn upon.
Grokking the infoviz The Economist Technology Quarterly, June 19th 2003
Information
Visualization: Graphical Tools for Thinking about Data Clay
Shirky, Release
1.0 September, 2002 [Paid archive]
Notes that information visualization tools give
the user a greater degree of freedom to explore underlying
relationships in the data set, producing something no spreadsheet
can: the gestalt of the data. They also offer novel solutions to
the problem of search by presenting the user with richer ways of
browsing volumes of data, and by giving them better tools for building
complex queries.
A
Picture Is Worth a Thousand Charts Stephen H. Wildstrom, Business
Week January
20, 2003 [Paid archive]
Mentions Map of the Market, Ben Shneiderman (and quotes
from his book Leonardo’s Laptop), Grokker and Mindjet.
A New Company Tries to Sort the Web’s Chaos John Markoff, New York Times October 27, 2002 [Paid archive]
Forget the Files and the Folders: Let Your Screen Reflect Life David Gelernter, New York Times November 7, 2002 [Paid archive]
Information visualization is defined by Chomei Chen, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Information Visualization, as a “computer-aided process that aims to reveal insights into an abstract phenomenon”.
Corrections and clarifications
From: "Shneiderman, Ben" <[email protected]>
To: 'Nico Macdonald' <[email protected]>
Subject: RE: Eye information visualisation
Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2003 09:51:06 -0400
HI Nico,
...
I am happy to have you mention me and my work...
but for future clarification:
- the treemap idea was mine in 1990 and my ACM Trans on Graphics
paper 1992 laid out the ideas. Brian Johnson was a great grad
student who did the first implementation, adding many features...
the joint conference paper with him appeared promptly in 1991.
- treemaps are not in the class of Self Organizing Maps, but
rather an algorithmic approach to layout that presents an established
hierarchy in an orderly way. Adjacency in SOMs is a result of
mapping from high-dimensional spaces to 2-D.
- Martin Wattenberg is a great guy, and he did work with me on
two papers, but was never a researcher (or student) at UMd.
...
Maybe you can tell the story of the currently hot treemap idea from www.hivegroup.com - their front end for 34,000 Amazon products is drawing lots of attention.
Best wishes... Ben S
