**Visualization Evaluation** *A Special Issue of Information Visualization,* Guest Editors: Enrico Bertini, Petra Isenberg, Tobias Isenberg, Heidi Lam, Adam Perer. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Visualization has recently gained much relevance for its ability to cope with complex data analysis and communication. Thanks to its ability to convey complex concepts in an efficient manner it has been adopted in many contexts; from scientific laboratories to newspapers. While the overall use of visualization is accelerating, the growth of techniques for the evaluation of these systems has been slow. How do we measure the quality of a visualization? How do we decide on competing designs? How do we know whether a visualization meets its goal? These are only some of the questions researchers and practitioners are confronted with when designing visualization systems. To understand how, when and why visualization works, evaluation efforts should be targeted at the component level, the system level, and the work environment level. The commonly used evaluation metrics such as task time completion and number of errors, when used in isolation, appear to be insufficient to quantify the complex quality and usage of a visualization system, therefore new metrics and methods to better evaluate visualizations are needed. This special issue calls for innovative ideas about how to evaluate visualization and reflections about its state of the art. We call for papers dealing with evaluation in the fields of scientific visualization, information visualization, and visual analytics. We explicitly discourage submissions describing exclusively the process and outcome of a given evaluation unless the methodology itself is innovative. Topics include, but are not limited to: * Evaluation in the visualization development lifecycle * Utility characterization * Evaluation metrics * Insight characterization * Synthetic data sets and benchmarks * Taxonomy of tasks * Computational evaluation * Benchmark development and repositories * Methods for longitudinal studies and adoption * Evaluation of early prototypes * Evaluation heuristics and guidelines * Evaluation of storytelling visualization * Evaluation of visualization as art Paper Submission Submissions due: Feb 8, 2013 Acceptance notices: Apr 15, 2013 Final revisions due: May 13, 2013 Publication: late 2013 Inquiries should be made to the guest editors by sending an email to chairs@beliv.orgElectronic submissions of manuscripts in PDF should be made using the online submission system and the papers should be formatted according to the journal standards. For details on the submission process, please visit the Journal's instruction website at: http://ivi.sagepub.com/ -- Petra Isenberg, PhD Research Scientist AVIZ group | INRIA Saclay Île-de-France phone: +33 16 91 54 249 |http://www.aviz.fr/~isenberg/