The Applied Semiotics of Visual Modelling

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In the digital age, every member of society needs to process, interrogate and understandcomplex data. In addition, more and more of us take part in or depend on specialised fields in whichinformation has to be absolutely precise, such as the design and creation ofsoftware. Graphical forms of communication are widely recognised as an effective way ofcommunicating certain types of information, whether through a simple data visualisation such asa bar chart accompanying a newspaper article, or through a complex diagram which specifies acomputer system. Thus, there are many benefits inherent to understanding how these graphicalforms work, and what makes them more or less effective (relative to, say, the written word) forcertain tasks.Semiotics is the perspective that analyses these graphical notations as so many arrangements ofsigns. The field of semiotics began with the work of Charles Peirce, who provided a richlythorough analysis of the types of signs, their components, the relations of the components toone another and so on. Despite several initial approaches and numerous differing perspectiveson the same problem, no one has yet applied the semiotic method in depth to the analysis ofdiagrammatic languages to make predictions of their cognitive potentials; that is what thisproject sets out to do.We will begin by analysing several widely used data visualisations, including those which areused interactively, from a Peircean perspective. That is, we will use Peirce's classificationof types of sign and their correlation with different types of information to make predictionsabout the potential effectiveness and suitability of the visualisations for particulartasks. We will correlate these predictions with findings from cognitive science and HCI, wheresuch visualisations are studied from different points of view. This evaluation will result inguidelines for the use of existing techniques and generalised criteria for the design of datavisualisations. The next step in our project is to use the frame of reference explained above to analyse thelogic of concept diagrams. Concept diagrams were designed for knowledge representation and havebeen found to be more effective than symbolic alternatives for some tasks. A diagrammatic logicis more than data visualisation; it is a precisely defined graphical notation (e.g. Venndiagrams or concept diagrams), together with a set of rules for transforming and possiblycombining diagrams in logically valid ways. Although they are not a panacea, when diagrammaticlogics are used in place of "traditional" symbolic alternatives, certain advantages can arise:in some circumstances a diagram effectively reveals more information than was required for itsconstruction. This is a key source of the power of diagrammatic communication, wherebyinformation is revealed "by construction" that would need to be inferred as a result of somechain of reasoning if the information were presented in a symbolic language. The means by whichthis takes place are a central part of Peircean semiotics, and are also of great interest todisciplines outside semiotics, such as human-computer interaction and cognitive science. One ofour contributions will be our attempt to reconcile and find agreements or inconsistencies amongthese different accounts of the "natural" or "intuitive" power of diagrams and datavisualisation. In this way, we aim to enable people to make better use of existing notationsand design more effective notations for the future.