| authors |
Ganter, John H. |
| year |
1988 |
| title |
Interactive Graphics : Linking the Human to the Model |
| source |
GIS/LIS'88 Proceeding accessing the world (3rd. : 1988 : San Antonio). December, 1988. Vol. 1: pp. 230-239 : ill. includes bibliography |
| summary |
Discovery and innovation, which have traditionally involved thinking visually and producing images, increasingly benefit from labor-saving devices like GIS and CAD. As new visualization technologies are implemented, it is particularly important to understand the human faculties which use pictures as tools in thinking. Science and engineering define problems, explain processes, and design solutions through observation, imagination and logic. This conceptual thought relies on a cognitive `database' of sensed verbal and non-verbal information, which is retained, managed, and updated within the short and long-term human memories. Research suggests that the individual must actively manipulate a phenomenon under study and its representations to enhance and maintain this database, and to produce abstractions and generalizations. Graphics are particularly important in this process of discovering correlations, contradictions and connections, and subsequent communication to others. Graphics offer high information density, simultaneity, variable detail and the capacity for showing multivariate relations. A `gestalt' property leads to the discovery of new relationships since the graphic whole always exceeds the sum of its parts. A cycle occurs in which the individual interacts with the phenomenon and produces explicit knowledge in the form of graphics and text, testing and refining each against knowledge and abstractions held in the mind |
| keywords |
information, computer graphics, perception, user interface, visualization, cognition, abstraction |
| series |
CADline |
| references |
Content-type: text/plain
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| last changed |
2003/06/02 13:58 |
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