Envisioning information - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 30

from honeycombs and cobwebs to crowds of upturned faces and flocks of arrows
(Figures 1.17 and 1.18).
Here visualization is used to make millions of figures understandable without
massacring their meaning, without reducing them to tables, graphs, crude maps or
models. Visualization is not about simplifying; it is about revealing, through the
process of aiding understanding. If we are to understand the structure of society
we must find ways of imagining it. This topic demonstrates how large amounts
of simple information can be shown and then goes on to increase the potential
of the graphics by conveying increasingly detailed information (Box 1.3).
The pictures shown here are of things that cannot be easily (or adequately)
described, discussed or modelled, and yet many people who see them expect to
understand them in an instant, even when they may fail to understand the long
complicated narratives, which explain them badly, or the intricate mathematical
models, which could represent them inadequately. 19
If you want to know the shape of Britain you look at a map. You can then
go on to investigate rivers and mountains, lakes and bays. Here you can look at
the shape of 1980s British society - not the physical landscape but the human
one. However, to know the shape you have to look at the picture, you cannot
just describe it in words. 20
19 It remains the case that we cannot produce images at will. 'The unhappy thing about all this,
of course, is that whereas I have the ability (and we all have the ability if we're sighted) to take
images in at a fantastic rate, I have no ability to create images with the same facility. This is a
one-way street. On the other hand, I can create language and symbols at about the same rate I can
take them in, which means I can create speech at about the same pace that I can listen to it. So it
is not at all unexpected that for most of us language seems to be the main carrier of our thoughts
because that is the thing we can hear ourselves saying and were conscious of its use' (Huggins,
1973, p. 37).
20 One day soon you may be able to create images as quickly as words, but at that point a new
form of language will have been created. The last time humans invented a new form of language
was when they became human over 60 000 years ago. It can take as long as 21 years to draw an
image and then have it printed (as in this topic). Try to imagine if that process took 0.21 of a second
and then you showed me how you imagined it too. Do this and we have a visual conversation; we
change the pictures in our minds as we draw them for each other, agreeing, disagreeing and learning.