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and measuring a ground truth. This realization is at the core of all the issues
involved in communicating the value of InfoVis. By its very nature, by its very
purpose, InfoVis presents fundamental challenges for identifying and measuring
value. For instance, how does one measure insight? How does one quantify the
benefits of an InfoVis system used for exploring an information space to gain a
broad understanding of it? For these reasons and others, InfoVis is fundamentally
challenging to evaluate [17].
If we accept that InfoVis may be most valuable as an exploratory aid, then
identifying situations where browsing is useful can help to determine scenarios
most likely to illustrate InfoVis' value. Lin [11] describes a number of conditions
in which browsing is useful:
-
When there is a good underlying structure so that items close to one another
can be inferred to be similar
-
When users are unfamiliar with a collection's contents
-
When users have limited understanding of how a system is organized and
prefer a less cognitively loaded method of exploration
-
When users have diculty verbalizing the underlying information need
-
When information is easier to recognize than describe
These conditions serve as good criteria for determining situations in which the
value of InfoVis may be most evident.
1.1 Epistemological Issues
Natural sciences are about understanding how nature works. Mathematics is
about truth and systems of verifiable inferences. Human sciences are about un-
derstanding Man in various perspectives. Information Visualization is about de-
veloping insights from collected data, not about understanding a specific domain.
Its object is unique and therefore raises interest and skepticism.
Science has focused on producing results: the goal was essentially the creation
and validation of new theories compatible with collected facts. The importance
of the process — coined as the Method — was raised by the development of
epistemology
in the 20th century, in particular with the work of Karl R. Popper
(1902-1994) [18]. It showed that the Method was paramount to the activity of
science.
Karl Popper has explained that a scientific theory cannot be proved true, it
can only be
falsified
. Therefore, a scientific domain searches for theories that are
as compatible as possible with empirical facts. The good theories are the ones
that have been selected by domain experts among a set of competing theories
in regard of the facts that they should describe. Popper considers science as a
Darwinian selection process among competing theories.
Still, no other scientific domain has argued that generating insights was im-
portant for science. Popper does not explain how a new theory emerges; he only
explains how it is selected when it emerges. Furthermore, Popper has demon-
strated in an article called “The Problem of Induction” that new theories cannot
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