Just a quick pointer to three inter­est­ing papers about the trends in and mod­els of infor­ma­tion visualization:

Andrea Lau and Andrew Vande Moere

Towards a Model of Infor­ma­tion Aes­thet­ics in Infor­ma­tion Visualization

This paper pro­poses a model of infor­ma­tion aes­thet­ics in the con­text of infor­ma­tion visu­al­iza­tion. It addresses the need to acknowl­edge a recently emerg­ing num­ber of visu­al­iza­tion projects that com­bine infor­ma­tion visu­al­iza­tion tech­niques with prin­ci­ples of cre­ative design. The pro­posed model con­tributes to a bet­ter under­stand­ing of infor­ma­tion aes­thet­ics as a poten­tially inde­pen­dent research field within visu­al­iza­tion that specif­i­cally focuses on the expe­ri­ence of aes­thet­ics, dataset inter­pre­ta­tion and inter­ac­tion. The pro­posed model is based on analysing exist­ing visu­al­iza­tion tech­niques by their inter­pre­ta­tive intent and data map­ping inspi­ra­tion. It reveals infor­ma­tion aes­thet­ics as the con­cep­tual link between infor­ma­tion visu­al­iza­tion and visu­al­iza­tion art, and includes the fields of social and ambi­ent visu­al­iza­tion. This model is unique in its focus on aes­thet­ics as the artis­tic influ­ence on the tech­ni­cal imple­men­ta­tion and intended pur­pose of a visu­al­iza­tion tech­nique, rather than sub­jec­tive aes­thetic judg­ments of the visu­al­iza­tion out­come. This research pro­vides a frame­work for under­stand­ing aes­thet­ics in visu­al­iza­tion, and allows for new design guide­lines and review­ing criteria.

While I find the tri­an­gle model based on Data, Inter­ac­tion and Aes­thet­ics quite enlight­en­ing and use­ful, I am not so con­vinced of the data focus and map­ping focus clas­si­fi­ca­tion. Any­ways a great paper.

Robert Kosara

Visu­al­iza­tion Crit­i­cism – The Miss­ing Link Between Infor­ma­tion Visu­al­iza­tion and Art

Inter­est­ing points, espe­cially the claim that we need to think about frame­works to crit­i­cize infor­ma­tion visu­al­iza­tion exam­ples and tech­niques from dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives. The pre­sented model, how­ever, is quite sim­plis­tic, focussing on read­abil­ity and rec­og­niz­abil­ity, and based on that, a one–dimensional and —from my perspective—too shal­low dis­tinc­tion of prag­matic vs. artis­tic approaches.

Fer­nanda B. Vié­gas and Mar­tin Wattenberg

Artis­tic Data Visu­al­iza­tion: Beyond Visual Analytics

A nice overview of not strictly ana­lytic approaches to infor­ma­tion visualization.