Beyond Bertin: Seeing the Forest despite the Trees
Caroline Ziemkiewicz, Robert Kosara · IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications · 2010
Visualization is at a point in its development where its practitioners frequently find themselves grappling with big questions about its nature and purpose. These include fundamental questions about how visualization works-that is, how do people interpret visual forms as information? However, the answers to this question haven't evolved greatly since visualization's early days. The classical view is that visualization is a process of encoding numerical or categorical values as visual (or retinal) variables such as size, distance, or color, which the viewer then decodes to reconstruct the original information. This variable-encoding model is the simplified essence of Jacques Bertin's Semiology of Graphics and the years of visualization theory that have built upon it, including Jock Mackinlay's work on automated presentation design and Leland Wilkinson's The Grammar of Graphics.