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Information visualization conversation with Mike Migurski and Fernanda Viegas

Over on the IDEA Conference blog, I've posted the beginning of a discussion on information visualization, giving us all a peek into what Mike and Fernanda will be presenting at the conference.

Some choice quotes:

"At the conference, I'm hoping to talk about how to "democratize" visualization use (following successful deployments such as the NameVoyager vis)"

"I was super cautious about privacy and made a point of always explaining to my users (the owners of the email archives being visualized) that they would be the only ones looking at those visualizations. I explained to them that I would never show those images to anyone else without their consent. Well, as soon as people started playing with the visualizations, they wanted to share the images with others!!"

"If you look at the academic information visualization community, researchers aren't focusing on the social side of their applications. Infovis folks love to explore techniques that allow them to scale the data they are showing. But what happens when you scale the audience that's looking at a visualization? This is the question we are currently exploring."

"I think a key success of the NameVoyager is to keep the data visualized *super simple*. It's almost like there's an inverse relationship between the complexity of the data, and the complexity of the conversation around the data."

"I like the idea of visualization as an alert system for social information rather than a contemplative one, and we've made efforts to spur projects with this characteristic."

"Fun fact: the original drafts of our Digg work were called "The Ultimate Stoner Tool", because author & blogger Om Malik said during some panel that his favorite activity was smoking dope and watching Digg Spy scroll by."