This review of scientific visualization in the social sciences contains an
extensive review of recent literature and Internet sources on visualization
and discusses the extent to which four key visualization technologies-the
World Wide Web, multimedia, virtual reality, and computer graphics-are prev
alent in the different social sciences. The review includes examples taken
from political science, psychology, social statistics, economics, and geogr
aphy. It concludes that visualization research in the social sciences is, a
t present, relatively uncoordinated with no central core. It tends to be do
minated by those subjects with the closest links to the natural sciences, w
ith a clear pattern of diffusion from scientific to social scientific resea
rch.