Communications of the ACM
Painting By the Numbers: Data Visualization
Digital visualization encompasses both art and analytics, and serves as a communication tool in areas ranging from hip hop to scientific collaboration.
Credit: Jerome Cukier
There is rising interest in digital visualization at Harvard University and worldwide. Digital visualization encompasses both art and analytics, and serves as a communication tool in areas ranging from hip hop to scientific collaboration.
"Until 2007, what we saw was usually static…ever since then, with libraries such as D3 or Canvas or WebGL, you can do pretty cool stuff that works reliably on many platforms," says Alexander Lex, a postdoctoral visualization researcher at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Student designers who enroll in Harvard's CS 171 class attend a special lab in which they work with a guest designer to learn the basics of shape and layout. "It really starts with drawing lines and circles on a sheet," Lex says. "Then we go on to sketching user interfaces."
Matthew Battles is a senior researcher at metaLAB, a Harvard research unit that explores networked culture in the arts and humanities. Battles believes all visualizations are made using a series of data collection and design choices rather than being absolute truths. "Human beings are particularly susceptible to cognitive loops like apophenia, which is seeing patterns where no meaningful pattern exists," he says. "In the absence of pattern, we make pattern." Battle says this suggests visualizations need to be integrated with a larger narrative along with other claims and counter arguments.
From The Harvard Crimson
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