tailieunhanh - Towards an Aesthetic Dimensions Framework for Dynamic Graph Visualisations

What kind of film is it whose protagonists are forbidden to speak; whose surfaces are avisual, often consisting only of paragraphs of text or tables of numbers; 1 whose climactic moment is the receipt of a file of old documents; whose director laments, ‘Nobody wants to talk to [me]. There is nothing to see. . What is there to film in any case?’ 2 The chances are that it is a film about information. These days, many of the images that appear to our senses 3 are no more than the effects of the information that generated them. The graphical user interface (GUI) of computers – a set of images that index actions of information. | 2009 13th International Conference Information Visualisation Towards an Aesthetic Dimensions Framework for Dynamic Graph Visualisations Fabian Beck beckf@ Michael Burch burchm@ Stephan Diehl diehl@ University of Trier Germany Abstract Most research on the readability of graph visualisation focuses on node-link diagrams of static graphs. But in many applications graphs are not static but change over time or graphs are too dense to be drawn as node-link diagrams. In this paper we look at dynamic graph visualisations We translate the general goal of graph visualisation to convey the underlying information of a graph into aesthetic dimensions that are applicable in practice. These aesthetic dimensions help to design compare and evaluate dynamic graph visualisations. 1 Introduction While the aesthetics of node-link representations of static graphs have been studied a lot 1 those of alternative visual representations as well as those of visual representation of dynamic graphs have received little attention. The quality of visual representations of graphs in form of nodelink diagrams has been widely assessed by how good they meet certain mostly geometrical requirements often called aesthetic criteria in the literature. These include the minimisation of the number of edge crossings or the reduction of overlap of nodes and links. The goal of these criteria is to improve the aesthetics of the visual representation. Empirical studies 9 8 have tried to validate or rank these criteria by how good users could solve given tasks based on different visual representations of graphs. In essence these studies reduce aesthetics to usability or more precisely readability. In this paper we discuss and classify different representations of graphs Section 2 and different approaches to visualise the dynamics of graphs Section 3 . In Section 4 we formulate general aesthetic criteria for graph visualisations propose aesthetic criteria for visual .