BUT

Visualisation that does not reflect analysis (as per the visualisation manifesto http://bit.ly/1GTu8n) can’t deliver insight. It’s like a picture book story without the story. Pretty, but without a story to keep me turning the pages.

The point is that visualization is a tool for helping us understand and communicate data in ways that are not intuitive for most people. To convert the counterintuitive to intuitive. ;) Some people are visual learners and others have a preferred learning modality of hearing or touch, so the idea of converting data displays to accommodate the preferred learning modality of the user would seem to indicate that “data visualization” might be more accurately described without the embedded word ‘visual’. Perhaps data art?

There is a fascinating image in Gordon Dickson’s book, The Final Encyclopedia, in which the encyclopedia is an interactive databank that displays the shifting information structures in a 3D holographic sensory barrage or light, movement, sound (texture?) that is so complex most people either can’t perceive it or it drives them nuts. The librarian was the person who could understand the “visualization.”

There are people who combine data displays across a variety of senses. I have in mind Iannis Xenakis who converted mathematics, computer programs, and architectural designs into orchestral performance pieces. I once conceived a piece of music where the score was derived from a line drawing. Only the conductor could see the lines combine into the visual display, and the performers would see only the individual lines. Remember the message sticks from Australia or the kente/adinkra cloth from Ghana?

“Is visualization only analytical? Can visualization be art? Are the infographics that frequent the front page of Digg visualization or are they just pretty pictures? Can visualization be just a pretty picture?” It seems to me that the answers are implied in the framing of the questions. Data visualization (or data art?) by definition is a combination of analysis and communication, both facilitating discovery on the part of either the creator or the audience. A data art creation (whether visual or auditory) can lean more towards analysis or more toward communication, but must contain elements of both.

‘Visualization’ (in its many disparate but commonly bound forms) is not only a way to share insight and context… but to develop deep thoughts, and really work through hurdles and problems: a form of non-physical kinesthetic learning.

Interactive visualizations play this role for the end user, but the act of creating a visualization plays this role solely for the creator.

there’s scientific visualisation, information visualisation, information aesthetic visualisation, visualisation art, information graphics…and they’re all different and special =)

so: no, yes, yes, yes.

Visualization is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. Visualization through visual imagery has been an effective way to communicate both abstract and concrete ideas since the dawn of man. Examples from history include cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek geometry, and Leonardo da Vinci’s revolutionary methods of technical drawing for engineering and scientific purposes.

Visualization today has ever-expanding applications in science, education, engineering (e.g. product visualization), interactive multimedia, medicine, etc. Typical of a visualization application is the field of computer graphics. The invention of computer graphics may be the most important development in visualization since the invention of central perspective in the Renaissance period. The development of animation also helped advance visualization.

Interestingly, I didn’t see any terms in Christian’s graphic (http://tr.im/CvHw) that separated the artistic and informative uses of visualization. Like the other terms, there would be a lot of grey area, but there’s enough distinction to warrant some new ones.