Tuesday, June 28, 2005

The Landscape Metaphor This issue of InfoVis by Juan Dursteler explores the use of the landscape metaphor to organize information. "In the previous message we spoke about ThemeScape, a visualisation that uses the landscape metaphor to represent in the form of a topographical map a document space where distance between each two documents is inversely proportional to their similarity. There is considerable evidence that the human brain uses what in cognitive psicholgy are called "schemata". Although the rigorous definition of a schema would require more space than the one we have here available, we can consider it as a structured set of generic knowledge that can be applied to many specific situations." "When designing a visualisation, the designer uses his or her set of mental schemata to elaborate a visual metaphor (see number 91) that will be implemented into the visualisation. If the mental schemata of the receptor of the visualisation do not match in some way to those of the designer it's more than possible that the receptor won't understand the visualisation or will not be able to extract all of its possibilities." I've cited Dursteler's work several times in this weblog and cited other thinkers about the subject and also cited software tools (such as Inspiration) to facilitate cognitive mapping. Visualization and mapping are critically important subjects for professionals interested in both learning and in the facilitation of access to online learning resources. Without clear and comprehensive maps, browsable categories, and meaningful search tags successful access to learning materials is extremely difficulty--users quickly become overwhelmed and fail to fully utilize the resources of learning repositories. ____JH 3:51:46 PM    COMMENT []