The dark side of visual analytics

Big data, complex computations, and the need for fluent interaction, are the well known enemies of Visual Analytics. They can seriously impair the fluent interactive back and forth between computational analysis and human analyst that happens using the visualizations that a Visual Analytics solution provides for supporting this combined analysis. The emerging Progressive Visual Analytics (PVA) took the field and wage a war against such enemies, providing a way around this conundrum by iteratively computing partial results of increasing quality, that constitute a natural means for providing the analyst with early and continuous interaction with the initial results even while the whole process is still far from being completed. However, this promising solution has several implications that must be dealt with, requiring to address different issues. This paper has the goal of providing a travel guide about the practical usage of PVA, discussing the motivations that call for its usage, the possible strategies that can be used to solve the problem and the fee that requires to be payed in order to use this approach. In order to provide a concrete discussion, the paper is driven by a concrete and intriguing example, an intractable PVA solution developed for Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM).