Will Evans has written a fantastic treatise on Dynamic Visualization: introduction and Theory over at Semantic Foundry. It discusses several classifications of visualizations and how they succeed, and how they fall.
The visualizations that are created must support the cognitive requirements such as pre-attentive processing, working memory, etc.. To do this, many of the same theories, strategies, and techniques are also duplicated in a dynamic visualization (Image Theory, the Gestalt Laws, verbal / visual dual-coding, etc.) Instead, I will give a brief overview of the literature, cognitive processes, and techniques that are unique to dynamic displays. This article is roughly organized into the following sections: Introduction, Dynamic Visualizations, and Conclusion, References, and Apologia.
