ABSTRACT
The working mind is greatly leveraged by interaction with the world outside it. A conversation to share information, a grocery list to aid memory, a pocket calculator to compute square roots all effectively augment a cognitive ability otherwise severely constrained by what is in its limited knowledge, by limited attention, and by limitations on reasoning. Visualization employs the sense with the most information capacity; advances in graphically agile computers have opened opportunities to exploit this capacity, and many visualization techniques have been developed. A few examples suggest the possibilities. The use of information visualization for finding things is illustrated by the Film Finder. Unlike typical movie-finder systems, the Film Finder is organized not around searching with keywords, but rather around rapid browsing and reacting to collections of films in the database. The TreeMap of the stock market allows monitoring and exploration of many equities. Again, much data is represented in little space.
