2. It's a question of distance...

For the purposes of this presentation, we place communication theory and human-machine interface theory within the same framework. To build a visualization is to build an interface whose purpose is to communicate the author's intention, which in turn is based on the data whose interpretation the map reveals.

The difficulty in communicating lies in the potential distortions that the message may undergo from the sender (the designer of the visualization) to the receiver (the user), implicitly defining a distance between the information sent and the information received. We can take and identify three levels at which this distance is established:...