Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 7.
Your Reaction and Visual Answer: Creating a Metaphor for a Set of Factors to Make a Visualization
Choose a theme that interests you. It may be a project you are just working on or a group portrait of people you are working with. First,
you may want to visualize the theme in two ways, journalistic and artistic: writing a description of your project or a group profile of people
(verbal approach) or graphically presenting a group of people of your choice (visual approach). Depending on the kind of visualization you
will work on, whether it be a personal, cultural, social, political, or psychological depiction, you will cope with a different set of variables
you will have to take into account. For this reason, you will have to structure your data toward different metaphorical representations.
Design a visualization using a metaphor showing the organization of your concept. It would be useful to create a metaphor for a set of char-
acteristics that make up a whole group profile and show individual features. Explore and communicate your concepts and their relevance
to one another. Decide if would be a hierarchical order or an assembly without ranks that would characterize your theme better and would
be helpful in exploring and communicating relations between individuals.
For example, for a hierarchical presentation of your concept, you may use a description of the animal kingdom, the primary division in bio-
logical classification with its phyla (such as Chordata), classes (such as Mammalia), orders (such as Carnivora), families (such as Canidae),
genera (such as Canis - Latin 'dog'), and species (such as doglike species - dogs, wolves, jackals, coyotes, and foxes).
If the connections among concepts you describe are not hierarchical, you may draw a garden and arrange various plants, shrubs, and trees
in specified relations. For this purpose, you may want to use stamps, a collection of downloadable brushes, or a clipart.
Figure 3. Tiffany Mulford, “Home” (© 2010, T. Mulford. Used with permission)
