Copyright©2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

This is a significant contribution to an increasingly important area ofapplication design. Information visualisation, or ‘InfoVis’, involves thedesign of interactive systems based on 2D and 3D graphics, offeringinsight into large amounts of data. Over the past thirty years or so,InfoVis has grown gradually out of scientific visualisation (SciVis) andSpence has been involved from the beginning. There is no strictboundary between the two. A typical SciVis application might beexamining airflow over an aeroplane’s wing or the shape of a CAT-scanned tumour, whereas typical InfoVis applications are findingpatterns inside a graph of Web documents, analysing a largespreadsheet of financial data or exploring production parameters foran electrical component.

The book’s main competition is Readings in Information Visualization byCard, MacKinlay and Shneiderman, which has an excellentintroduction to InfoVis in its first chapter but mostly consists of aselection of landmark research papers. Being from one author’s hand,Spence’s book gives a gentler and more consistent introduction. Therecent text by Ware, Information Visualization: Perception for Design,focuses more on low-level perceptual issues whereas Spence’s book is

focussoftware22 Volume 1, Issue 2

December 2000focusbooks

InformationVisualizationRobert SpenceAddison-Wesley, 2000ISBN: 0-201-59626-1 206 pages Price: UK £34.99 Hard Cover

above all about practical design. No descriptions of graphics hardwareor complex algorithms here, because Spence’s aim is the reader’sinsight into the design of visualisations and interactions rather thanthe internals of visualisation systems.

The author uses many examples, images and sketches in presenting awide range of techniques, beginning with the basics of rearrangementand selection of data, graphing and plotting, representationalfeatures such as colour, size and pattern, and dynamic interactiontechniques. The chapter on perception, cognition and memory issomewhat weak in its use of contemporary theory ofhuman–computer interaction and psychology. But he soon moves onto more recent techniques and systems for filtering, selection andzooming, as well as specialised approaches for trees, graphs,documents, and sets of mathematical equations. Some less reliabletechniques such as Chernoff faces and cone trees are described alongthe way, but overall Spence offers us a useful palette of techniques.He has an authoritative list of references, reaching further afield andfurther back than any I have seen in this area.

Quite rightly, Spence treats InfoVis as a craft, neither art nor sciencealone. However, in creating a set of tools that we can ‘dip into’ whendesigning a system to suit our data, tasks, and work environments, heconstrains the book. He has deliberately avoided building anyoverarching narrative or theoretical structure, and in fact he does notoffer any concluding or summarising chapter, which is where onemight expect an author to squeeze in theoretical discussion before thereferences and indices appear. Spence’s view is that the comingdecade may see general theories become established, but as yet theyare immature or inchoate.

Such theories will have to go beyond low-level perceptual issues suchas visual acuity and spatial memory, to handle issues such as theinterpretation of graphical symbols, contextual dependence, and therelationships between visualisation and related topics such ascartography, visual languages and graphic design. Spence gives fewclues as to where these theories may come from, even though earlierwork such as MacEachren’s How Maps Work: Representation,Visualization and Design has surely defined the territory: semiotics.Stronger narrative structure would make it a better candidate for anundergraduate textbook, able to stand alone as a course’s basis, anddeeper treatment of theory would better serve the postgraduatestudent or researcher. Nevertheless, the book is a valuable resourcefor teaching and design, and should be owned by every practitioner.

Matthew ChalmersDepartment of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UKmatthew@dcs.gla.ac.uk

...a valuable resource for teaching and design, and should be owned by every practitioner