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  • Information Visualization: An Introduction, Third Edition by Robert Spence
  • Jack Ox
Information Visualization: An Introduction, Third Edition
by Robert Spence. Springer, Heidelberg, Germany, 2014. ISBN: 978-3-319-07340-8.

I am a person who discovered visualization by creating artworks. For over 30 years I dedicated my creative explorations to making visual performances of extant examples of music. I have lately focused my attention on scientific collaborations that use multimodal representations as part of a larger collaboration, which makes me part of the art-science community. I will review Information Visualization: An Introduction, Third Edition from that point of view. I think that this approach is logical when taking into account the transdisciplinary, art-science audience that is attached to Leonardo. With this in mind, I would describe this book as a design manual for people who need to learn the visualization world quickly and with a broad outlook of design processes.

Robert Spence wrote this Springer book for persons relatively new to interaction visual design. It is structured to take the reader on a path that moves from the source (intention), through various environmental configurations (process), until a proficiency of craft has emerged. As Spence writes, his book is not aimed at experts in the field of visualization—but rather to readers seeking an intense and concentrated exposure to interaction design for visualization. However, I do recommend that you buy the actual book, not the eBook version, which constantly turns diagrams on their sides. It is important to be able to study comfortably the diagrams and engage with the examples.

A representation is the end of the process of organizing data into a comprehensible entity. In the act of perceiving, one is constructing knowledge and must filter the incoming data so that patterns are recognized. Our brains engage in data mining. The basic perceptual patterns our brains recognize include object identities, locations or movement, color, size and other meaningful attributes. Many artists are playing with these concepts in their collaborations with scientists.

The quite interesting mental model that Spence describes and uses for interaction designs is Don Norman’s Action Cycle, taken from Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things (1988). Spence takes this model apparent in the everyday world into the design of dynamic queries and action plans that are ubiquitous interactive cross-modal mappings and navigational interactions. For the artist-scientist who means to put him- or herself into the domain of science, it is important to familiarize oneself with the methods and techniques used by scientists. This book does not give examples of delicious visualizations, such as seen in Tufte’s volumes; instead it gives prototypes of different ways to approach visualization problems. It traces a broad course of various methodologies used for designing interactive systems, ones that sort out information into digestible units. The book is a good textbook for early courses in visualization techniques.

In summation, Information Visualization is a toolkit that describes in logical order many different kinds [End Page 178] of visualization formats and charts. It is a reference book, complete with exercises that make it a great textbook for a class or for a solo person trying to enlarge their technical vocabulary of visualization techniques. Spence gets as close to the level of prototype as he can. This book is a distillation of the myriad visualization schemas out there.

Jack Ox
Email: <jackox@comcast.net>.
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