Data Visualization is NOT Useful. It’s Indispensable.
I just came back from Visualizing Europe, a great event organized by Visualizing.org in Brussels to gather several key data visualization actors in the European scene and discuss the state of the art and potential future of visualization.
I had the honor to be invited in the panel session organized by Andrew Vande Moere to discuss the power and potential of visualization together with a bunch or great data visualization designers like Santiago Ortiz, Moritz Stefaner and David McCandless.
To tell you the truth I felt a bit like being the black sheep; but not with a bad feeling! I was the only one in the panel with a core CS visualization research background and the audience too was not to “researchy” as the usual audience I am used to talk to. What a wonderful occasion I thought!
So, when I got the invitation I started thinking about a talk that could send a strong message and stick into people’s mind. And suddenly I recalled I blog post I wanted to write since a long time about the questioned usefulness of information visualization; a complex that afflicts many of us.
I was originally inspired by a message I received from Jorge Camoes (ExcelCharts) in which he pointed me to a couple of interesting blog posts on visualization usefulness.
The first one is from Jorge and is titled: “Is Data Visualization Useful? You’ll Have to Prove It“. In this post he argues that believing that data visualization is useful is an act of faith and that we have no scientific evidence of its usefulness. Along similar lines the second post is from Stephen Few who in his blog post “True Stories about the Benefits of Data Visualization” confesses he has a hard time convincing people of visualization’s usefulness.
After reflecting a little bit about their content and their frustration I recognized the same frustration in me and decided it was time to react. And my reaction, I decided, had to be a strong one. I realized in fact that the whole problem of visualization usefulness can be removed if we change our mindset. I realized that one of the reason why we ask ourselves whether visualization is useful or not is because we don’t have a clear focus on those problems in which visualization is not just useful, but plainly indispensable.
In the rest of the post I’ll try to articulate this idea further, with the hope I will convince you it is important to change our mindset and focus more on problems where the net gain of introducing visualization is extremely high. But let me start by providing a few examples of problems I have personally experienced where I think visualization is clearly indispensable.
In the following I provide three example of indispensable visualizations. I hope this will convince you that when visualization is indispensable it is evident.
Example #1: Bart and his moving animals Bart is a biologist and he studies animals. More precisely he wants to understand how animals move and how contextual factors influence their behavior. Think birds migrating from one place to another exploiting the right wind at the right moment or lions searching for a prey and trying to optimize their energy expenditure.
Problem is that animal movement analysis today is a very technological endeavor. Animals have GPS and other sensors attached and can be tracked continuously around the world and generate enormous amounts of data. Plus, this data can be enhanced with contextual factors like weather conditions, making the whole thing more difficult. How do you deal with that? Can you do it without visualization? The problem is that not only they want to test some hypotheses and assumptions they have, but they also want to be able to come up with new ideas.
My colleague and dear friend Florian Mansmann (together with his valuable students) helps Bart and his colleagues understanding how these animals move, and developed a nice tool to visualize traces in time and to correlate them with contextual factors.
