The Shaping of Information by Visual Metaphors

The nature of an information visualization can be considered to lie in the visual metaphors it uses to structure information. The process of understanding a visualization therefore involves an interaction between these external visual metaphors and the user's internal knowledge representations....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 2008-11, Vol.14 (6), p.1269-1276
Main Authors: Ziemkiewicz, C., Kosara, R.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biomimetics - methods
Cognition
Compatibility
Computer Graphics
Computer Simulation
Correlation
Data visualization
Delay
evaluation
hierarchies
Index Terms&#8212
Information Dissemination - methods
Information Storage and Retrieval - methods
Knowledge representation
Metaphor
Metaphors
Models, Theoretical
Performance evaluation
Shape
Tasks
Testing
Tree graphs
Usability
User-Computer Interface
Visual
Visualization
visualization theory
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Description
Summary:The nature of an information visualization can be considered to lie in the visual metaphors it uses to structure information. The process of understanding a visualization therefore involves an interaction between these external visual metaphors and the user's internal knowledge representations. To investigate this claim, we conducted an experiment to test the effects of visual metaphor and verbal metaphor on the understanding of tree visualizations. Participants answered simple data comprehension questions while viewing either a treemap or a node-link diagram. Questions were worded to reflect a verbal metaphor that was either compatible or incompatible with the visualization a participant was using. The results suggest that the visual metaphor indeed affects how a user derives information from a visualization. Additionally, we found that the degree to which a user is affected by the metaphor is strongly correlated with the user's ability to answer task questions correctly. These findings are a first step towards illuminating how visual metaphors shape user understanding, and have significant implications for the evaluation, application, and theory of visualization.
ISSN:1077-2626
1941-0506
DOI:10.1109/TVCG.2008.171