Superconductor: A Language for Big Data Visualization

Increases in data availability is the force behind many recent innovations in society. However, visualization technology for exploring data is not keeping up. Designers must choose between scale and interactivity. They want big displays because of the ability to show an entire data set. However, viewers get lost in a sea of noise, so they also want interactivity. Performance constraints limit interactions to operating on a small data slice. We present SUPERCONDUCTOR: a high-level visualization language for interacting with large data sets. It has three design goals that we distilled from popular visualization languages: