Abstract. Overview is a frequently used notion and design goal in information-visualization research and practice. However, it is difficult to find a consensus on what an overview is and to appreciate its relation to how users understand and navigate an information space. We review papers that use the notion of overview and develop a model. The model highlights the awareness that makes up an overview, the process by which users acquire it, the usefulness of overviews, and the role of user-interface components in developing an overview. We discuss the model in relation to classic readings in information visualization and use it to generate recommendations for future research.

Abstract. We discuss the impact of cultural differences on usability evaluations that are based on the thinking-aloud method (TA). The term ‘cultural differences ’ helps distinguish differences in the perception and thinking of Westerners (people from Western Europe and US citizens with European origins) and Easterners (people from China and the countries heavily influenced by its culture). We illustrate the impact of cultural cognition on four central elements of TA: (1) instructions and tasks, (2) the user’s verbalizations, (3) the evaluator’s reading of the user, and (4) the overall relationship between user and evaluator. In conclusion, we point to the importance of matching the task presentation to users ’ cultural background, the different effects of thinking aloud on task performance between Easterners and Westerners, the differences in nonverbal behaviour that affect usability problem detection, and, finally, the complexity of the overall relationship between a user and an evaluator with different cultural backgrounds.

A formal semantics for low-level perceptual aspects of meaning is presented, tying these together with the logical-inferential aspects of meaning traditionally studied in formal semantics. The key idea is to model perceptual meanings as classifiers of perceptual input. Furthermore, we show how perceptual aspects of meaning can be updated as a result of observing language use in interaction, thereby enabling fine-grained semantic plasticity and semantic coordination. This requires a framework where intensions are (1) represented independently of extensions, and (2) structured objects which can be modified as a result of learning. We use Type Theory with Records (TTR), a formal semantics framework which starts from the idea that information and meaning is founded on our ability to perceive and classify the world, i.e., to perceive objects and situations as being of types. As an example of our approach, we show how a simple classifier of spatial information based on the Perceptron can be cast in TTR.

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