information visualization and social visualization

. Early work on information visualization emphasizes the power of graphical representation in enhancing our cognitive capabilities to process data and information. By representing abstract and numerical data in graphical forms, it makes the data and relevant patterns more perceptually intuitive and easy to understand. its power has been widely employed for data intensive fields such as scientific and business data processing and analysis . As Card points out, "Information visualization is commonly defined as ''the use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition"

More lately, graphical visualization techniques have been applied not just on scientific or business data for the purpose of intellectual inquiries and analysis, but also on social data (e.g. social presence and activities) in support of social interactions, especially in the field of computer-mediated social interactions. The latter is generally explored under the term of "social visualization" by Donath or "social proxies" by Erickson and Kellogg. for revealing patterns, structures and impressions, graphical representation is considered to be superior than text-only interfaces.

Issues with social visualization is different from general information or data visualization in a number of ways. First, social data is usually subjective and inexact, and poor choice of graphical representations can be easily misleading and spurious. For instance, Donath et al. () discuss how the color codings tend to suggest meaningful interpretations (e.g. orange conveys a cheerful mood while a dull brown is depressing) and careless coding might introduce confusions. Fisher have discussed this issue in their work. Second, social data is a more sensitive material than general dataset, since it is to disclose information about people after all, which requires designers to be more responsible and sensitive to the potential ethical, political and moral issues that social visualization might introduce in the setting. In particular, privacy factors must become an integral part of design considerations. Third, social data is more dynamic, especially when visualizing real time social data for on-going social actions, which poses great challenges for designers to accommodate unexpected characteristics of incoming data.

the central question, Donath et al. tries to answer with social visualization is "what does an on-line conversation looks like?" They have explored social visualizations, in an attempt to reveal individual identities and convey the ambiance of the site as a way to provide a richer environment for online social itneraction as well as provide insights of the community itself. the They are concerned with conveying the right information that is already there and try best to avoid being misleading and spurious.





. Nowell (Graphical encoding for information visualization) suggests that no more than five to six colors should be used in coding a display and that color-coding should only be used for the information that is most directly relevant.

2. social visualization in actions