The Craft of Information Visualization : Readings and Reflections

Since the beginning of the computer age, researchers from many disciplines have sought to facilitate people's use of computers and to provide ways for scientists to make sense of the immense quantities of data coming out of them. One gainful result of these efforts has been the field of information visualization, whose technology is increasingly applied in scientific research, digital libraries, data mining, financial data analysis, market studies, manufacturing production control, and data discovery.

This book collects 38 of the key papers on information visualization from a leading and prominent research lab, the University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL). Celebrating HCIL’s 20th anniversary, this book presents a coherent body of work from a respected community that has had many success stories with its research and commercial spin-offs.

Each chapter contains an introduction specifically written for this volume by two leading HCI researchers, to describe the connections among those papers and reveal HCIL’s individual approach to developing innovations.

*Presents key ideas, novel interfaces, and major applications of information visualization tools, embedded in inspirational prototypes.

*Techniques can be widely applied in scientific research, digital libraries, data mining, financial data analysis, business market studies, manufacturing production control, drug discovery, and genomic studies.

*Provides an "insider" view to the scientific process and evolution of innovation, as told by the researchers themselves.

*This work comes from the prominent and high profile University of Maryland's Human Computer Interaction Lab

Benjamin B. Bederson is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and a member of the Institute of Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park, where he is also Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. Prior to UM he was an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico, and worked in the Interactive Media and Computer Graphics Research Group at Bell Communications Research (Bellcore). Dr. Bederson received his Ph. D. in Computer Vision and Robotics from New York University. He has published extensively, and is well known for the widely used software he developed including the Pad++, Jazz and Piccolo toolkits for Zoomable User Interfaces.

Ben Shneiderman is a professor in the Department of Computer Science, Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL), and Member of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and the Institute for Systems Research, all at the University of Maryland at College Park. Dr. Shneiderman lectures and consults internationally, while serving on corporate advisory boards and producing widely used textbooks. He was made a Fellow of the ACM in 1997, elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2001, and received the ACM CHI (Computer Human Interaction) Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.