An Empire Built On Sand
Robert Kosara · 2016
If we were to design Information Visualization from scratch, we would start with the basics: understand the principles of perception, test how they apply to different data encodings, build up those encodings to see if the principles still apply, etc. Instead, visualization was created from the other end: by building visual displays without an idea of how or if they worked, and then finding the relevant perceptual and other basics here and there.