The Case for Interactive Data Visualizations

The human visual system is a pattern seeker or enormous power and subtlety. The eye and the visual cortex of the brain form a massive parallel processor that provides the highest bandwidth channel into human cognitive centers. At higher levels of processing, perception and cognition are closely interrelated, which is why the words understanding and seeing are synonymous.

So writes Colin Ware in his in his classic book Information Visualization: Perception for Design. We humans have always processed information in different ways. Many neurologists, academics, and researchers have proven what most of us intuitively have known for a long time: data visualization matters. In other words, there is something very powerful about how we see information in graphical formats. But don't think for a minute that all data visualizations are created equal.