Visual analytics play off the idea that the brain is more attracted to and able to process dynamic images than long lists of numbers. But the goal of information visualization is not simply to represent millions of bits of data as illustrations. It is to prompt visceral comprehension, moments of insight that make viewers want to learn more. “The purpose of visualization,” says Ben Shneiderman, founding director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland, “is insight, not pictures.”