Overview

Information visualisation is an essential tool in data-science, but the lack of a theoretical foundation currently prevents visualisation science to make substantial progress and develop solutions for the epistemological challenges posed by Big Data.

Starting from the current state of the art in formal logic and the philosophy of information, the prospects of a new foundation for information visualisation are explored. This should lead to a model of the information-lifecycle in visualisation that sheds light on trade-offs in design decisions, gives a unified account for reasoning and communication with visualisations, and explains why and how information-visualisation allows us to climb the Data-Information-Knowledge hierarchy.

Given the epistemic challenges in science and in policy-decisions, substantial attention is also devoted to what can go wrong with the use of information-visualisation, which requires the development of an account of mis- and disinformation, and of fallacious reasoning based on computer-generated representations of data.