Envisioning information - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 11

1.3 Beyond illustration

Visualization is a method of computing. It transforms the symbolic into
the geometric, enabling researchers to observe their simulations and
computations. Visualization offers a method of seeing the unseen.
(McCormick, DeFanti and Brown, 1987, p. 3)

Visualization is now a way of working - a methodology as much as a process.
Not only does it differ from the use of script and figures - reading and calculating
to understand - but also from conventional graphics, which aim to illustrate.
Illustration is used to convey a discovery from one person to another, a discovery
that was usually found by other means. Visualization is the transformation of
numbers into pictures in order to see what a mass of figures cannot tell us, let
alone could not inform others about (Figure 1.7).
Visualization, its early advocates suggested, is how discovery is made. For a
time the method became the message. 6 Most visualization research today relies
on huge quantities of numerical information. 7 Before you have such information,
you can only write about what you think is happening. However, the problem
for positivists (people who like countable things) is that once you have counted
what is happening - who does what, who has what - how do you understand it?
How should we analyse information? Without visualization, statistical anal-
ysis gives you single figures, averages, correlations, parameters of assumed
relationships, probabilities and so on. Such numbers are only of use if you know
exactly what you want, but knowing what questions to ask is much harder than
finding the answers to questions set. Social science is not about defining and
testing simple hypotheses; it is about understanding societies.
There are many ways to begin studying society. All involve some form of
ordering, of which the spatial is the most common. The patterns that visualiz-
ing society reveals usually turn out to show complex and subtle relationships
that tax our mental capabilities to comprehend and explain. This is not a bad
thing - stretching the mind forces the imagination. Hundreds of thousands of

6 'Computer graphics and image processing are technologies. Visualization, a term used in the
industry since the 1987 publication of the National Science Foundation report “Visualization in
Scientific Computing”, represents much more than that. Visualization is a form of communication that
transcends application and technological boundaries' (DeFanti, Brown and McCormick, 1989, p. 12).
7 In the social sciences this was traditionally provided by voting data: 'In many ways elections
are a positivist's dream. Millions of people go through the process of voting in numerous countries
every year and these decisions are put together and published by areal units ready for analysis by
social scientists' (Taylor, 1978, p. 153).