Following are a few quotes from the introductory chapters that may give you a better sense of the book:
"Ben Shneiderman's information visualization mantra, overview first, zoom and filter, details on demand, concisely describes the traditional elements of an interactive information visualization system." (p14)
There, Conti is setting the groundwork for his shared philosophy on the use and manner of visualization.
"Today, few technologies bridge the gap between human and machine processing. In the future, I envision tools that maximize the pattern-matching and anomaly detection strengths of humans and allow human insights to be communicated to machines for high-speed automated processing." (p26)This quote is an interesting prediction, and one that I suppose makes sense from the current perspective. However, I find it unlikely that computer processing of visualizations will not at some point advance greatly, to parallel human processing. Of course, that may be centuries for all I know. :)
