The development of information visualization

Information visualization in a broad sense has a long history, and the earliest practice of information visualization can be traced back to the Paleolithic era, when people recorded astrological movements, drew navigation maps, and formulated crop planting plans by means of graphs and drawings on petroglyphs or terra cotta.

In the early 18th century, information visualization began to form a scientific and universal methodology, but at that time there was neither line graphs nor bar charts. Since the birth of data graphics in the late eighteenth century, visual means of representing abstract information have been used to reveal the mysteries of data and other hidden patterns.

In 1786, William Playfair, a Scottish engineer and economist, published The Illustrated Collection of Commerce and Politics, a total of forty-four charts and graphs documenting British trade and debt during the period 1700-1782, showing the commercial events of the period. These charts were a significant improvement on the prevailing tables of the time, and he proposed three standardized methods of data visualization, namely pie charts, bar charts, and line charts, which are used to this day and have evolved into a number of variations.

Into the 20th century, due to the development of computing power, the development of information visualization has made outstanding achievements. the development of information technology in the second half of the 20th century created the development and prosperity of the discipline of information visualization, which continues to the present day. in 1967, a French cartographer, J. Bertin, published their theory of graphs, which specifies the basic elements of charts and describes the design of the charts. In 1983, E.R. TuRe, a professor of statistics at Yale University, published the theory of data graphs.

The theories of Bertin and TuRe are influential in many fields, which caused the great development of information visualization. In the process of the development of information visualization, the emergence and development of scientific visualization played a decisive role in promoting the development of information visualization. 1987 American Graphics Special Interest Group (ACM SIGGRAPH) published a special issue of “Visualization in Scientific Computing”, after this, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and other international academic organizations have held a number of academic conferences in the field of information visualization.

In 1989, Stuart K. Card, Jock D. Mackinlay and George G. Robertson coined the English term “Information Visualization”. The newly introduced graphical interfaces during the 1990s enabled people to interact directly with the visualized information, which led to the research of information visualization.

With the further development of related technologies and the penetration of information visualization applications into all aspects of social life, information visualization will develop from traditional low-dimensional visualization to high-dimensional visualization, and from static visualization to dynamic and interactive intelligent visualization in the foreseeable future. In the foreseeable future, the application of information visualization in virtual reality and augmented reality, big data analysis, artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge fields has a broad prospect.

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What is the development of visualization? This can be illustrated with an example.

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