Visualization: The Medium - Data Points: Visualization That Means Something - page 387

in the same way you might judge a slapstick comedy because you go in with
different expectations and a different mindset. Similarly, you don't expect a
romance novel from a textbook or complain about how unfunny a television
crime drama is.

Note: There are rules and design suggestions
for visualization. These are fine, but you can't
just blindly follow them. Consider goals and
applications.

A series of comical pie charts shouldn't be put under the
same microscope as visualization research, unless those pie
charts happen to be part of research on how people react
to comical pie charts. If so, I would like to read that paper,
because I'm sure it's hilarious.

Again, this is not to say that you should be less critical of funny graphs or data
art than you are of exploratory visualization. People examine comedy and art
all the time. Just know what you're critiquing.

ANALYSIS AND EXPLORATION

William Playfair is credited with inventing many of the traditional chart types
used today: the line graph, the bar chart, and the pie chart. In 1786, Playfair
published the first bar charts in The Commercial and Political Atlas , which
showed progress via indicators such as imports and exports, as shown in
Figure 2-1. Figure 2-2 shows one of the first pie charts. These charts were
handmade on paper, of course.

It's hard to believe that as late as the 1970s this was how people looked at
data—by hand. In John Tukey's seminal Exploratory Data Analysis , published in
1977, he described how to darken the shade of lines by using a pen instead of
a pencil. Such a technique seems ancient now. The good news is that technol-
ogy advanced, and Tukey continued to innovate with what became available.

In line with the improvements of technology, the volume of data and avail-
ability has increased dramatically, too, which in turn gave people something
new to visualize (and new jobs and fields of study). Because remember: There
is no visualization without the data.

In 2001, Wikipedia (the collaborative, online encyclopedia) launched, and as of
this writing has 35 million registered users. Anyone can edit Wikipedia entries,
so when someone starts an article, it can grow and shrink as others add and
delete information. This creates a dynamic within every article, especially as
individuals argue over what should and shouldn't be written.