paula R01

Graphical Excellence

What is graphical excellence? The simplest answer would be the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words”. The author actually alludes to this saying when comparing a time-series graph of House of Representatives postage spending before an election and a newspaper article of 700 words discussing the same topic. The goal of data graphics is to represent large amounts of data in a clear, easily understood manner. In a way it is a way of displaying data that corresponds to the right brain or non-verbal capabilities of the human mind.

Mental development also seems to have played a part in the development of graphic representation systems. Geographical maps have a long history going back thousands of years before the present era. It is perhaps easier for the mind to make a physical representation of something that is already physical than it is to represent statistical measurements or the passage of time. Isolated examples of the latter did not occur until the Middle Ages and did not become commonplace until about the time of the Industrial Revolution in the West.

It is interesting to note the gap of 800 years between the planetary movements timeline and the next known example of such time series depictions as indicated in the article. It would seem to indicate that these ideas are the products of exceptional individuals and not the result of a long tradition. This gap may also be accounted for by the restricted dissemination of such materials, perhaps even their suppression by the powers that be, as well as by the limited number of people who would have been educated enough to understand the data presented. Certainly a person would need to combine the talents of both the artist and the scientist to create such graphic representation of data and such persons may have been hard to come by at the time. Is our current emphasis on the sciences to the detriment of art programs perhaps leading to our own dark age in some aspect of our cultural and intellectual development?

While graphic representations have their advantages, they also have their limitations. As with any process, what you get out of it will correspond to the quality of what you put into it so that graphic representations are dependent first and foremost on the quality of the data that is collected or measured. Even with that, however, graphic representations are limited by our ability to see and understand what we see. A data map printed in black and white will be limited by the degrees of gray that we will be able to easily differentiate when creating symbols used in the map. If data ranges are broadened as a result, a symbol representing data in its high range will seem completely different than a symbol representing data in its low range although the values may not be that far apart. Furthermore, our mental processes will attempt to understand visual elements in terms of objects we already know so that lines will appear or patterns will be grouped into circles or rectangles that do not exist in the data. The mind will fill in the visual gaps to suit its predispositions.

The use of more refined categories is not always better either. The graphic example discussed in the article regarding the export of wine from France to several other countries using lines whose thickness represented to amount of wine exported and the direction of the line indicating the countries to which the wine was exported was very clear and easy to understand. However, if more products were added and more countries of export were depicted, the graphic would soon become incomprehensible even if countries and products were color-coded. Determining which method of representation would work with a particular set of data is more of an art than a science.

As Marey’s man in black velvet and Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase illustrate, data collection and representation could serve as a basis for creating artworks. Many of the graphical data representations in the article have an artistic quality in themselves. It would be interesting to explore enhancing the graphic representations as artworks completely divorced from their practical uses as representations of data.