Conclusion: Another geography - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 280

10
Conclusion: Another
geography
And let us be aware of the natural tendency to design computer-
graphic programs to imitate traditional cartographic conventions in
the mistaken belief that because they are traditional they are, ipso
facto, legible.
(Bickmore, 1975, p. 350)
New techniques have been presented in this topic exploiting the visual pro-
cessing ability of the human brain to provide an opportunity for interpretations
that may better capture the nature of society. 1 This is unlike black box tech-
niques, in which the last thing you can see is what is really going on. In simple
statistical analysis, for instance, sharp lines are often drawn between what is sig-
nificant and what is not, giving little insight into the true nature of a picture of
numerous interactions.
By placing people in their spatial context, we often find unforeseen patterns
of great interest (Figure 10.1). Visualization allows for a more open-minded style
of analysis. It may seem as if we are doing little more than observing the world,
but that world is usually hidden from us in vast tables of facts and figures, or in
1 'Perhaps one day high-resolution computer visualizations, which combine slightly abstracted
representations along with dynamic and animated flatland, will lighten the laborious complexity of
encodings - and yet still capture some worthwhile part of the subtlety of the human itinerary' (Tufte,
1990, p. 119).