Something about Chapter 2
The author introduced several “crosscutting” concepts that can guide design choices for a vis tool. To me, it’s more important to know these ideas if I still want to read the book. Instead of articulate the concepts in words, I think the vis at the beginning of this blog post stands for everything I need to know about Chapter 2.
There is one thing that stands out and make me think. It is the distinction between the abstract concept as a dataset and it’s visual representation in a vis tool. For example, a table dataset could be represented in a form of network or tree if there are inherent connections between the values in the cells. This realization is important because it allows us to break the design of a vis tool into two pieces which are the abstract dataset and its representation. For each piece we would have different set of methodologies to analyze it or make design decisions based on it.