Exploring the Value of Casual Infovis

Many untrained humans can efficiently and intuitively understand a visualization of data and publicly available casual information visualization tools provide a potentially powerful way to understand various questions and issues across disciplines, education levels, and possibly beyond the limits of literacy. The purpose of casual infovis could be non-analytic, artistic, qualitative instead of quantitative, reflective, social, entertainment, awareness raising, or more darkly it could spread negative knowledge or false influence. There are many attributes to consider when discussing the value of the wide variety of casual infovis. Casual infovis is good for the public because it provides opportunities for insight, innovation, storytelling, or aesthetics, and it’s good for traditional infovis because studying edge cases like casual infovis can provide insight into central problems and opportunities in infovis, help develop new vocabulary, and also complement the traditional infovis focus on expert analytic tasks [20].