In the current issue of American Scientist, there’s an article by Robert Kosara about the differences between SciVis & InfoVis.  He does a good job talking about the differences and similarities, and how they can both be used to further science and data analysis.

Visualization is often valued for producing pretty pictures for publications. But in scientific disciplines that work in nonspatial realms (bioinformatics, chemistry, the social sciences and so on), visualizing data is useful very early in the process of discovery. Turning numbers into pictures enables scientists to use their human prowess with reading visual data to spot patterns, trends and outliers.

via American Scientist