Test photo. A visual exploration on mapping complex networks. Information Visualization Manifesto. Posted: August 30th, 2009 | Author: Manuel Lima | Filed under: Uncategorized | – “The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures” Ben Shneiderman (1999) – Over the past few months I’ve been talking with many people passionate about Information Visualization who share a sense of saturation over a growing number of frivolous projects.
The criticism is slightly different from person to person, but it usually goes along these lines: “It’s just visualization for the sake of visualization”, “It’s just eye-candy”, “They all look the same”. When Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas wrote about Vernacular Visualization, in their excellent article on the July-August 2008 edition of interactions magazine, they observed how the last couple of years have witnessed the tipping point of a field that used to be locked away in its academic vault, far from the public eye.