Creation and Collaboration: Engaging New Audiences for Information Visualization - Information Visualization: Human-Centered Issues and Perspectives - page 92

Creation and Collaboration: Engaging New
Audiences for Information Visualization

Jeffrey Heer 1 ,FrankvanHam 2 , Sheelagh Carpendale 3 ,ChrisWeaver 4 ,and
Petra Isenberg 3

1 Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences,
University of California, Berkeley,
360 Hearst Memorial Mining Building, Berkeley, CA 94720-1776, USA,
[e-mail]
2 IBM Research, Visual Communications Lab,
1 Rogers Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA,
[e-mail]
3 Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary,
2500 University Dr. NW, Calgary, AB, Canada T2N 1N4,
{ sheelagh, petra.isenberg } @ucalgary.ca
4 GeoVISTA Center and the North-East Visualization and Analytics Center,
Department of Geography, Penn State University,
302 Walker Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA,
[e-mail]

1 Introduction

In recent years we have seen information visualization technology move from
an advanced research topic to mainstream adoption in both commercial and
personal use. This move is in part due to many businesses recognizing the need
for more effective tools for extracting knowledge from the data warehouses they
are gathering. Increased mainstream interest is also a result of more exposure to
advanced interfaces in contemporary online media. The adoption of information
visualization technologies by lay users - as opposed to the traditional information
visualization audience of scientists and analysts - has important implications for
visualization research, design and development. Since we cannot expect each of
these lay users to design their own visualizations, we have to provide them tools
that make it easy to create and deploy visualizations of their datasets.
Concurrent with this trend, collaborative technologies are garnering increased
attention. The wide adoption of the Internet allows people to communicate across
space and time, and social software has attained a prominent position in con-
temporary thinking about the Web. For example, one can think of software
teams distributed over different time zones or multiple people collaborating to
build an online encyclopedia. Furthermore, collaborative issues are not limited
to the web: novel display and interaction technologies, including wall-sized and
tabletop interfaces, introduce new possibilities and challenges for co-located col-
laborators. An increased need for specialization means that we can no longer
rely on a single person to perform deep analyses of complex phenomena. These