Experiences in testing an information visualization tool, In-Spire, with a user community of intelligence analysts are described in this paper. Analysts were enticed by the prospect of manipulating and visualizing the relationships between 30,000 to 70,000 documents at once, offering a chance to take a birds-eye approach to selecting and filtering material.

An interesting feature of In-Spire is an interface to the analysts’ usual search engines, so their usual query results can be highlighted in the visualization. Every time we use a search engine, we play the role of an intelligence analyst. Visualization interfaces for search engines have not become mainstream, and it is interesting to consider why this is so.

This gap--between intriguing visualizations provided by a research tool and mainstream analytical use of these visualizations---is the other main theme of the paper. The authors observe that the visualization tool is helpful at the initial research or data monitoring stage. However, it needs to be integrated into the analytical workflow of research, analysis, and dissemination, and needs to be able to transparently handle real-world data collections, with their formatting and grammatical errors, and multi-themed content.

This seems to be the fate of so many potential visualization applications over the past 20 years: they are nice to have, but are not quite must-haves. Is this because of the lack of the right visual metaphor, or of practical tool integration into our query workflows, or is it because 1,000 words are more useful than a picture after all?