The wood and the trees - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 236

glyphs in this work using the branches of trees to show the shape as well as
local buoyancy of the owner-occupied housing market. 10
Just as castles grew out of bar charts, trees have grown out of weather vanes.
Rather than order the spokes as a wheel, they become the branches of a tree.
This works because we are used to seeing trees that vary in their shape but have
a rough symmetry about them. The order in which the variables are assigned
to the trunk, branches and twigs is crucial for the impression gained. What is
usually done is to place the most important variable at the base, and so on up
the tree with information of least import altering the lengths and/or angles of
the thinnest, uppermost, branches. Whether this works or not depends on the
information being depicted.
A relatively convincing wood of glyph trees can be created. Thickets, copses
and spinneys of different species can be identified. Overall tendencies for trees
to have certain combinations of features in certain parts of the picture, and for
other combinations never to occur, can also be noticed on cartograms made up
of forests of tree glyphs.
The idea of using the two-dimensional position of the glyphs to show infor-
mation has often been mentioned, but, because of technical problems and the
great caution many cartographers profess to using cartograms, glyphs are rarely
used. Glyphs really come into use when the order in which they are drawn on
the page has meaning, as well as the order of variables within their own struc-
ture having meaning. At this point it really becomes possible to see the wood,
through the trees, through the leaves. The images could not be retrieved from
their back-up disks to be included in this topic at high quality, but showed the
1980s housing division of Britain. They can still be found on the web as low
quality scans of Prints CXLVIII and CXLIX of the original thesis. 11

8.6 Crowds of faces

Both the glyphs and the triangles can raise the dimensionality by two
by locating the center on a point in two-dimensional space.
(Chernoff, 1973, p. 365)

The most contentious glyphs created to date are based on human faces, first
drawn by Herman Chernoff. Faces, it is argued, are the visual image we are

These are the City of Glasgow and the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea' (Webber and
Craig, 1978, p. 13).
10 This market was later to be closely linked to voting. The dependency of voting on other
measures of change is a widely held, but infrequently substantiated, hypothesis: 'The Conservative
party argued that it was producing a new, prosperous, disciplined country, where enterprise flourished.
For those whose local circumstances confirmed that message, there was a greater propensity to vote
for that party than was the case for those whose local circumstances indicated that if the government
was restoring prosperity, it was doing it elsewhere' (Johnston and Pattie, 1989b, p. 104).
11 For a link to all the original prints, and more, see: http://www.sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/thesis/
prints.html.