Catherine Plaisant’s paper “The challenge of information visualization evaluation” from AVI 2004 was honored by ACM SIGMM  (Multimedia) today.

For the first time ACM SIGMM gave Test of Time awards this year. The selection committee looked at 10 year old papers to give the 2020 award, then gave a single honourable mention for each year prior to that, all the way back to 1994, considering all the papers of all conferences sponsored by SIGMM (such as AVI).
Catherine’s paper won for the year 2004.

The paper described the methods used to evaluate Information Visualization at the time, and the need to imagine new evaluation approaches that take into account the long exploratory nature of users tasks, the value of potential discoveries or the benefits of overall awareness. It pushed for better metrics and benchmark repositories.

Catherine Plaisant stated:
” The unusual fact about this paper is that it was not a standard refereed paper but a paper written to accompany the keynote I gave at AVI 2004.  I saw that it has 794 citations on Google Scholar today.  This demonstrates that it is a good idea to use keynotes as an opportunity – and deadline – to push ourselves to write fresh papers on broad topics, more general than our typical papers which describe a novel technique or system. I want to thank Francesca Costabile and Paolo Buono for inviting me to give the keynote at AVI, and Ben Shneiderman for encouraging me to write a paper to accompany the keynote.”