The persuasive phase of visualization

Research in visualization often revolves around visualizing information. However, visualization is a process that extends over time from initial exploration to hypothesis confirmation, and even to result presentation. It is rare that the final phases of visualization are solely about information. In this paper we present a more biased kind of visualization, in which there is a message or set of assumptions behind the presentation that is of interest to both the presenter and the viewer, and emphasizes points that the presenter wants to convey to the viewer. This kind of persuasive visualization -- presenting data in a way that emphasizes a point or message -- is not only common in visualization, but also often expected by the viewer. Persuasive visualization is implicit in the deliberate emphasis on interestingness and also in the deliberate use of graphical elements that are processed preattentively by the human visual system, which automatically groups these elements and guiding attention so that they "stand out". We discuss how these ideas have been implemented in the Morpherspective system for automated generation of information graphics.