Highlighting in Visual Data Analytics

Highlighting has been known as a basic viewing control mechanism in computer graphics and visualization for guiding users’ attention in reading diagrams, images, graphs, and digital texts. Due to the rapid development of theory and practice in information visualization and visual analytics, the role of ‘highlighting’ in computer graphics has been extended from just acting as a viewing control to being part of an interaction control and a visual recommendation mechanism that is important in modern information visualization and visual analytics. In this chapter, the authors present a brief literature review. They try to assign the word ‘highlighting’ a contemporary definition and attempt to give a formal summarization and classification of the existing and potential ‘highlighting’ methods that are to be applied in Information Visualization, Visual Analytics, and Knowledge Visualization. We also propose a new three-layer model of ‘highlighting’ and discuss the responsibilities of each layer accordingly.