Knowledge Mapping

[Alain Vaillancourt]

Hello!

>  Is there anything about the choice of colors that is intuitive?
> Probably not.

No, there is most certainly not!  To some users red is indicative of 
danger and means "stay away" but for other users it indicates great 
interest and it means "come to this red-hot topic".

All the instruction imaginable, all the pop-ups or legends you might 
put in will not change these ingrained user attitudes.

Any general Information Visualization software using colors at its 
presentation level should use them in a redundant fashion, presenting 
variations in shape also, to compensate for these variations in user 
perception of the meaning of  specific colors.  This also settles 
the problem of the color impaired and the question of printouts on 
monochrome printers or photocopies of color printouts on  monochrome 
photocopiers. You always have to take into account that someone 
someday is going to want to make photocopies of those nice color 
printouts, but will not take the trouble to go find a color copier.

On the other hand color is extremely useful as an option presented to 
the users for markup of files once you move from the general display 
to the personal desktops.  At that point users can choose whatever 
color they please to suit their own perceptions.  Many studies have 
been done on this and Lansdale et alia have gone a bit further with 
their research on this:

Lansdale, Mark ; M. Simpson;  T. R. M. Stroud. "A Comparison of
Words, and Icons as External Memory Aids in an Information
Retrieval Task".  Behaviour and Information Technology 	(England).
Vol. 9 (2).  March-April 1990.  pp. 111-131. 

> 
> I keep an eye out for interesting research in this area, but nothing much
> has really grabbed me.  Perspecta (www.perspecta.com) has one of the better
> fly-through spatial interfaces.  For reference to a bunch of others, see
> Gerry McKiernan's resource page:
> 
> http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/BigPic1.htm
> 
> 

Since I am preparing a Ph.D. subject on the use of icons and glyphs in 
Information Visualization  and in the user's desktop environment I am 
actively looking for research on the topic.

I have found this suggestion from the Big Picture site to be very
instructive:

YOUNG, P. Three Dimensional Information Visualisation. Technical
report, Computer Science Technical Report 12/96, Department of
Computer Science, University of Durham, Durham, UK, November 1, 1996.

http://www.dur.ac.uk/~dcs3py/pages/work/Documents/lit-survey/IV-Survey
/index.html

The trouble is that it has not been updated since  November1996

But:

There is a very recent survey of  Information Visualization, by U of
Maryland’s HCIL:

OLIVE On-line Library of Information Visualization Environments

http://otal.umd.edu/Olive/

Au revoir!

Alain Vaillancourt

ndgmtlcd at gslis.lan.mcgill.ca

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