Visualization: The Medium - Data Points: Visualization That Means Something - page 411

ENTERTAINMENT
Approaching the middle of the visualization spectrum, I start to lose people
rooted in the analysis side. I might have already lost you at the end of the last
section. This is when reader attention, engagement, and happiness tend to
grow more important and useful for the task than minimizing chartjunk and
increasing data-ink ratios. Although the latter is still important, people tend
to relate with the former more readily.
Some might feel antsy or scoff at the work that follows (I do still call myself
a statistician, so I can relate.), but there is value in visualization that isn't a
traditional, just-the-facts chart. There is value in entertaining, putting a smile
on someone's face, and making people feel something, as much as there is in
optimized presentation. Obviously, you don't embed a comic within a busi-
ness dashboard, but an entertainment-based publication? That's not so crazy.
“All of the great chartmakers make me feel something: alarm, wonder,
surprise, joy ... something. Even, I think you might argue in the case of
something like dashboard design, calm.”
—Amanda Cox
The definition split has a lot to do with use of the visualization label. In research
and academia, visualization is typically a data exploration tool that requires
precision and visual efficiency. You look at data, understand what you can,
and then quickly move on to another part of the data. Visualization research-
ers hope to generalize their results to be used with similar data types and
situations.
Practitioners, on the other hand, tend to design and create on a case-by-case
basis. They certainly draw from past work and experience, but often the goal
is to design a tool, interactive, or single graphic tailored to a dataset.
Because this dataset-tailored visualization is more visible, and academic
research can feel out of reach, the general public thinks of visualization mostly
of the former and less of the latter. The general public considers visualization
to be anything that places numbers in a graphical context, and you're either
someone who completely resists this, or you embrace it. There's no in between,
and I have yet to meet anyone who shifted to the other side.
I embrace it.