Envisioning information - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 24

are pretty, but not especially useful unless it is three-dimensional geometry in
which you are interested.
Animation, like perspective viewing, is also not as invaluable as has been
claimed. You cannot hold a moving picture in your mind as well as you can
hold a static image, and comparison of two dynamics, of two animations, is
very difficult.
Animation can tell a story. Visualization, more often, allows you to find a
story to tell (Figures 1.12, 1.13 and 1.14). Much more importantly, with both ani-
mation and perspective views, you are limited to producing very simple pictures
if you are to be able to understand them. Both perspective views and animation
are included in this work and they produce nice illustrations, but until the viewer
can easily control what is viewed, through interactive visualization, their utility
is limited. Even if you are reading this on a Kindle (topic reader) or on a dif-
ferent kind of computer screen, you (probably) cannot as yet spin the images in
this topic.
The use of colour greatly augments what can be seen in a two-dimensional
image. However, use of colour is still expensive in publishing, even in 2012.
Duplicating the prints shown here was almost impossible 21 years ago. 17 Colour
can also invoke unintended ideas: good and bad, hot and cold, near and distant
hues - but these can be used intentionally too.
In this topic colour is generally not included to make the pictures prettier. I
have used colour to include extra information in the image and to show how to
display more complex data. Often it is added as a final embellishment to elaborate
on how all is connected as other facets of the social structure are added as
further elements in an image (Figure 1.15). Sometimes removing colour clarifies
(Figure 1.16).

1.7 From mind to mind

That very ancient merger of Geography, Geometry and Graphics still
exists and, if anything, with increasing vitality. Many breakthroughs
still lie ahead. The map is the geographer's laboratory.
(Warntz, 1973, p. 85)

The argument in this chapter has developed from the initial desire to allow
people to convey what is in their mind, in a form others can see, to the point
where individuals are able to see and paint their own information. If we had all
been mute and suddenly were able, with the aid of a machine, to make sounds,

17 It may shock people today to read how expensive colour used to be, even more expensive than
computers used to be: 'Currently, however, the cost of publishing two-color plates in some scientific
journals represents more than half the cost of the laboratory computer that controls the experiment,
stores the data, and displays the results. Therefore, the use of color figures (which can best present
the results) might be hard to justify' (Long, Lyons and Lam, 1990, p. 138).