Defining Insight for Visual Analytics

Many have argued that providing insight is the main goal of information visualization. Stuart Card, Jock Mackinlay, and Ben Shneiderman declare that "the purpose of visualization is insight, while Jim Thomas and Kris Cook propose in Illuminating the Path that the purpose of visual analytics is to enable and discover insight. The idea that visualization should lead to insight seems logical, but researchers in the community have been slow to build on the concept because insight is difficult to define. As Ji Soo Yi and his colleagues point out, although a few definitions of insight exist, no commonly accepted definition has emerged in the community.