Visualization

Draft

Definition

The idea is to use a graphical representation to represent an information space, e.g. a complex concept, a WebSite or parts of the Web as a whole, user activities ....

DSchneider doesn't know if we should split this up like for example the Wikipedia:Visualization article (and add multimedia animations which are not necessarily the same as what they call Wikipedia: Knowledge visualization).

Types of visualizations

Lloyd Rieber (2002) categorizes visualizations according to their physical characteristics.

• representational - resemble the object represented ranging from realistic (photographs) to simplified lines and shapes.

• analogical - using a representation of an object with similar qualities to those of the object under study to highlight particular characteristics and phenomena (e.g. billard balls to introduce the concepts of momentum and kinetics of atomic particles).

• arbitrary - graphics that do resemble the concepts in question but reveal information through their spatial characteristics and the relationships between different elements of the graphics (e.g. charts, graphs, concept maps, outlines).

Visualization in education

Here is some (quick) brainstorming regarding different areas:

Organization of information spaces

Navigation of complex information spaces could be facilitated with visual navigation tools.

• A good example is (now disabled) Java Special:WikiViz visualization of this wiki or the light-weight SVG visualization you can see in the left menu. See our special pages. From time to time I test other applications - Daniel K. Schneider. An interesting Wikipedia visualization tool is wikimindmap (now open source, needs php 5.2 with curl).

An other exemple are tools like Nestor or Kartoo] that map out search results.

Finally, there exist specially made environments for education like the open source Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) developed at Tufts University.

Concept organization

Concepts and relations can be visualized with some kind of graph semantic map, e.g. Mind maps, Concept Maps or specialized langauges like UML.

In education, there exist several specialized concept map editors made with education in mind, e.g. the Visual Understanding Environment or learning design tools like Compendium LD.

Social maps

To display social webs and show what people do

Data visualization

To display complex (subject) data, i.e. students use a real tool

Discussion organization

• To organize & moderate group or class discussion (e.g. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]) writable tables or other devices

Learners, can either use or build visualizations (or both of course). We shall put some emphasis on building of course ...

Technology

(to complete some day)

Software for drawing graphics

• Various concept maps (e.g. mind maps)
• Topic maps
• Various UML tools
• Tree maps and pyramid maps
• Fractal maps
• Dynamic diagrams (e.g. [6])
• Flowcharts
• Venn diagrams
• Tree diagrams
• Network trees
• Fishbone maps
• Cycles
• Spider webs

Representation languages

See also formalisms used to represent semantic networks, ontologies, etc.

• The DOT Language (see also the graphviz article)

Viewers for formal languages

The principle is that such software can render graphs using some kind of formal representation language.

GraphViz Viewers:

• ZGRViewer. GraphViz/DOT Viewer
• iDot - Incremental Dot Viewer

There are others ...

Tools

(really not complete, includes both )

• Graphviz (a very popular and free visualization program for which many add-ons exist, e.g. viewers)

• Treemaps for space-constrained visualization of hierarchies. by Ben Shneiderman et al. (various software, some free)

• Tulip, created by David AUBER, is a contribution of the area of information visualization, “InfoViz”. Even if the Tulip framework allows the visualization, the drawing and the edition of small graphs, all the parts of the framework have been built in order to be able to visualize graphs having more than 1.000.000 elements

• Demolist from Laboratory for Information Visualization and Evaluation

Programming languages

• Processing is a popular open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool.

In addition to special purpose languages like "processing", any programming language with sufficient graphics can do, e.g.

• JavaScript, in combination with various formats like SVG, X3D.

• Actionscript 3, i.e. ECMAScript with Flash bindings.

Libraries for programmers

• Flare is an ActionScript 3 library (really good). “Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. From basic charts and graphs to complex interactive graphics, the toolkit supports data management, visual encoding, animation, and interaction techniques. Even better, flare features a modular design that lets developers create customized visualization techniques without having to reinvent the wheel.”, retrieved 15:00, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

• JavaScript Information Visualization Toolkit (JIT). “The JIT is an advanced JavaScript infovis toolkit based on 5 papers about different information visualization techniques. The JIT implements advanced features of information visualization like Treemaps (with the slice and dice and squarified methods), an adapted visualization of trees based on the Spacetree, a focus+context technique to plot Hyperbolic Trees, and a radial layout of trees with advanced animations (RGraph)”, retrieved 15:00, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

Links

Overviews

• Knowledge Maps of Researchers and Methods in the Visualization Field.
  • Check the "periodic table at the bottom of the page": Open the link and move your mouse over the cells. A really spectacular summary of different methods !
  • There is also an associated paper
• Visual Mapping A short module with pictures of different maps (part of a free visual thinking school on-line course).

Keep in touch

• Read Max Kiesler's VizList (also click on other tabs of this excellent web site ...)

Indexes

• some links collected for a course
• Links resource - Sciences Knowledge Domain: See Visualization I & II, Diagrams, and VR

On line examples

• Atlas of Cyberspaces
• Chris Harrison Visualization Projects (e.g. Wikipedia, Bible)
• Sense.us collaborative visualization system
• chaomei chen's home page. (Editor of Information Visualization)
  • CiteSpace (includes a Java webstart/download application)

Journals

• Information Visualization

References

• Heer Jeffrey; Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, (2007). Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Information Visualization, ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Abstract/PDF/Video.

• Rieber, L. (2002) Supporting discovery-based learning with simulations. International Workshop on Dynamic Visualizations and Learning. Online-Proceedings, Knowledge Media Research Center (KMRC), Tübingen, Germany. pdf

• Ralph Lengler & Martin J. Eppler, Towards A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods for Management, Institute of Corporate Communication, University of Lugano, Switzerland, PDF"]