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field and the rapid growth of an energetic and interdisciplinary scientific community
would be simply impossible without the remarkable vision and tireless efforts of Jim
Thomas (1946-2010), his colleagues of the National Visualization and Analytics
Center (NVAC) at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and the growing
community in visual analytics science and technology.
In 2004, Jim Thomas founded NVAC and initiated a new research area, visual
analytics. Visual analytics is the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by
visual interactive interfaces that focuses on analytical reasoning facilitated by
interactive visual interfaces (Thomas and Cook
2005
; Wong and Thomas
2004
).
Visual analytics is a multidisciplinary field. It brings together several scientific and
technical communities from computer science, information visualization, cognitive
and perceptual sciences, interactive design, graphic design, and social sciences.
It addresses challenges involving analytical reasoning, data representations and
transformations, visual representations and interaction techniques, and techniques to
support production, presentation, and dissemination of the results. Although visual
analytics has some overlapping goals and techniques with information visualization
and scientific visualization, it is especially concerned with sense-making and
reasoning and it is strongly motivated by solving problems and making sound
decisions.
Visual analytics integrates new computational and theory-based tools with
innovative interactive techniques and visual representations based on cognitive,
design, and perceptual principles. This science of analytical reasoning is central
to the analyst's task of applying human judgments to reach conclusions from a
combination of evidence and assumptions (Thomas and Cook
2005
). Today, visual
analytics centers are found in several countries, including Canada, Germany, the
United Kingdom, and the United States; and universities integrated visual analytics
into their core information sciences curricula which made the new field a recognized
and promising outgrowth of the fields of information visualization and scientific
visualization (Wong
2010
).
The key contribution of visual analytics is that it is motivated by analytic
reasoning and decision making needs with high uncertainty data. Visual analytics
emphasizes the role of evidence in analytic reasoning and making informed
decisions. This is precisely what is needed for mapping scientific frontiers, i.e.
evidence-based reasoning. In the second edition of the topic, we introduce the latest
development of visual analytics in relation to supporting analytic tasks pertinent to
mapping scientific frontiers.
1.3
Mapping Scientific Frontiers
This topic is written with a few groups of audience in mind, for example, researchers
and students in information science, computer science, history of science, philoso-
phy of science, and sociology of science. The topic is also suitable for readers who
are interested in scientometrics, information visualization, and visual analytics as
well as science of science policy and research evaluation.
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