Towards ubiquitous brushing for information visualization

Brushing is a collection of techniques to dynamically query and directly select elements on the visual display. Such interaction allows the user to explore the visualization, to interactively select a subset of points and see how these changes are updated in other related views. Traditionally, the artefacts that are 'brushed' are the plotted elements in the visualization (e.g. the points on a scatterplot, or the bars of a bar chart). In this paper we discuss the concept of Ubiquitous Brushing (UB), which brings together various different types of selection (whether in data space, screen space or views). Not only can users brush over elements in the display but also they can brush over various meta-information such as menus, legends or axis to affect the highlighted elements. The paper discusses the basic idea and demonstrates how subsequent UB operations can be compound together to provide useful dynamic filter operations.