Affordance, conventions, and design
interactions
Lines, Blobs, Crosses and Arrows: Diagrammatic Communication with Schematic Figures
Diagrams '00 Proceedings of the First International Conference on Theory and Application of Diagrams
The Shaping of Information by Visual Metaphors
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Grounding the lexical semantics of verbs in visual perception using force dynamics and event logic
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
Visual Thinking: for Design
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Information visualization is a powerful method for understanding and working with data. However, we still have an incomplete understanding of how people use visualization to think about information. We propose that people use visualization to support comprehension and reasoning by viewing abstract visual representations as physical scenes with a set of implied dynamics between objects. Inferences based on these implied dynamics are metaphorically extended to form inferences about the represented information. This view predicts that even seemingly meaningless properties of a visualization, including such minor design elements as borders, background areas, and the connectedness of parts, may affect how people perceive semantic aspects of data by suggesting different potential dynamics between data points. We present a study that supports this claim and discuss the design implications of this theory of information visualization.