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GCN Home > 01/21/08 issue

Ben Shneiderman | Visualize data

GCN Interview

By Trudy Walsh

ARE COMPUTERS making everyone more visual? Perhaps, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, said Ben Shneiderman, professor of computer science at the University of Maryland.

Shneiderman has long been interested in the relationship between people and computers.

He was founding director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, which designs, implements and evaluates new interface technologies.

He is the author of more than 200 technical papers and several books, including “Leonardo’s Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies,” which won the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ 2003 award for distinguished literary contribution.

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GCN: WHAT IS INFORMATION VISUALIZATION, AND WHY DO YOU HAVE SUCH AN EVANGELICAL VIEW OF IT?

SHNEIDERMAN: The early computer technologies were based on punch cards and lines of text. So the command lines, database query languages and output were straight textual rows and columns of data….[It’s]very useful for many, many applications.

However, when you’ve got thousands of rows of information, and I ask you to find the patterns, the clusters, the gaps, the outliers of relationships, it’s extremely difficult to do. A natural response has been to write statistical software tools that will compute correlation coefficients or other mathematical functions.

And that works for those people who have a good understanding of statistics.

But the exciting possibility is the visual nature of the computer and of the Web. It’s no surprise… that the compelling visual and animated Web sites are gaining the majority of user attention.

GCN: WHAT ARE SOME EXAMPLES OF THE EFFECTIVE USE OF INFORMATION VISUALIZATION?

SHNEIDERMAN: The first place to look is the ManyEyes Web site [GCN.com, Quickfind 882]. Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas at IBM did this Web site where users can upload their own data. Users can save the 14 or so visualizations on the Web site and then produce lively discussions.

Another interesting use of information visualization is Smart Money’s MarketMap [www.smartmoney.com/marketmap/].

Wattenberg also did this, and I was a consultant on it. There, you’re looking at 600 stocks at one glance. On the bright-green days, when the stock market is up, it’s a dramatic picture. The dark-red days, it’s a sad picture.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Hardware