What Exactly is an Insight? A Literature Review

TL;DR

This literature review explores the diverse definitions of insights in visualization, aiming to clarify the concept and guide future research and tool development.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive mapping of existing insight definitions and suggests directions for synthesizing a unified formalism.

Findings

Identifies multiple definitions of insight in literature

Highlights the lack of a unified formalism for insight

Suggests future research directions in insight theory

Abstract

Insights are often considered the ideal outcome of visual analysis sessions. However, there is no single definition of what an insight is. Some scholars define insights as correlations, while others define them as hypotheses or aha moments. This lack of a clear definition can make it difficult to build visualization tools that effectively support insight discovery. In this paper, we contribute a comprehensive literature review that maps the landscape of existing insight definitions. We summarize key themes regarding how insight is defined, with the goal of helping readers identify which definitions of insight align closely with their research and tool development goals. Based on our review, we also suggest interesting research directions, such as synthesizing a unified formalism for insight and connecting theories of insight to other critical concepts in visualization research.