Kim Rees has a great article on many of the papers at VisWeek, focusing mostly on the ones in the InfoVis track.
While many of the research was focused on trying to “do something better,” there was one paper that presented a novel, new type of data visualization. GestaltLines (PDF) by Ulrik Brandes and Nick Bobo of the University of Konstanz used balance to visualize dyadic relationships. Even in its most basic form, a ‘Gestaltline’ shows type, extent, and time of the relationship. Color is left as a degree of freedom to encode other variables. Using a sparkline or multivariate glyph approach, a gestaltline can easily be placed within text as a dataword. The technique seems like a very intuitive way of viewing relationships.
He includes PDF’s to the papers that he can (a welcome addition that I’m adding to my Evernote collection right now), and also covers some of the Visweek flops.
via The Most Interesting Papers at the Infovis Conference (VisWeek 2011) – information aesthetics.
