Hi Everyone,

We have a super guest this time on the show! Ben Shneiderman joins us to talk about his new treemap art project (beautiful treemap prints you can hang on the wall), treemaps and their history, and information visualization in general. Needless to say, we had a wonderful time chatting with him: lots of history and very inspiring thoughts (tip: we should look at vis 50-100 years from now!)

Take care.

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Links

• Software Psychology (early book from Ben Shneiderman)
• A short history of structured flowcharts (Nassi-Shneiderman Diagrams) (funny story of how this was badly rejected as a paper)
• Treemap History (from Ben Shneiderman’s web page)
• Tremap Art Project (new Ben Shneiderman’s art project) (you can download your own prints!)

Papers

• Bruls, Mark, Kees Huizing, and Jarke J. Van Wijk. “Squarified treemaps.” Data Visualization 2000. Springer Vienna, 2000. 33-42. [First algorithm taking care of aspect ratio]
• Bederson, Benjamin B., Ben Shneiderman, and Martin Wattenberg. “Ordered and quantum treemaps: Making effective use of 2D space to display hierarchies.” AcM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 21.4 (2002): 833-854. [paper with extensive evaluation of alternative treemap layouts]
• Ahlberg, Christopher, Christopher Williamson, and Ben Shneiderman. “Dynamic queries for information exploration: An implementation and evaluation.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, 1992.