I spend a lot of time reading blogs about data visualization (probably too much, which is why I haven’t been contributing any longer posts to this blog!). My favorite is Nathan Yau’s FlowingData. A few days ago he published a link to an article from ACM (the Association for Computing Machinery — a wonderfully anachronistic handle) called Interactive Dynamics for Visual Analysis. The authors write, “The goal of this article is to assist designers, researchers, professional analysts, procurement officers, educators, and students in evaluating and creating visual analysis tools. We present a taxonomy of interactive dynamics that contribute to successful analytic dialogues.” I don’t understand all of the technical details, but the taxonomy is certainly relevant to our discussion about visualizing the past. Plus, I like the idea of visualization as one mode of “data-wrangling” — i.e., another tool for historians to use to make sense of an incomplete historical record with too many data points.