Visualizing data is an art • Hacker News Board

Re: Visualizing data is an art

#61

Post by openrisk » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 12:19 PM UTC

wodenokoto wrote: post #51

openrisk wrote: post #38

Visualization seems to have stagnated in the AI craze era. Lots of androids touching holographic screens and what not, as metaphors for the almighty "AGI" coming any day now, but cant recall a major new development in the last five years? One area that might be "pregnant" for some new approaches is the visualization of large datasets, eg large graphs. Extracting useful (and objective) information instead of ovewhelmi…

What was the major new development in visualization in the past 10 years? I don’t think there has really been one in decades. We’ve gotten better tools for making viz interactive but that’s about it.

You are probably right. I would not discount the importance of many open source tools for making viz more widely available (and far more powerful than excel graphs) but its indeed tooling, not conceptual and in any case already available for more than a decade. Stagnation indeed.

Re: Visualizing data is an art

#62

Post by shriracha » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 12:49 PM UTC

patrick451 wrote: post #41

haswell wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data visualizations are absolutely used to evoke emotions. Many visualizations are built with the primary goal of driving behavioral change. These by definition will be playing on our hopes, fears, greed, to drive urgency, etc. Beyond the potential emotional power of a well-chosen and executed visualization, there's also a decent bit of research about the ability to influence mood via color choice. Color choice when…

I agree data visualization be used for emotional manipulation. But that is unethical. Dressing up rhetoric in the trappings of science is one of the many reasons science has lost tons of credibility in the last 20 years. Charts should be about hard data, not rhetoric.

If you really don't see any difference between "evoking emotion" and "emotional manipulation" then nobody will change your mind on this.

And like I wrote about, you can have very precise charts that can be extraordinarily manipulative.

The whole "charts should be about hard data" thing always sounds nice, until you realize that every visualization is an abstraction and brings in some human bias. You are always picking the scales, whether or not to use color, how to aggregate the data, etc. There is no such thing as a neutral chart.

Also... there are data visualizations outside of science. Of course science should be more precise than something like data art.

Re: Visualizing data is an art

#63

Post by wodenokoto » Fri, Feb 14, 2025, 4:58 AM UTC

pabloarteel wrote: post #11

No, it's not an Art. I get that people use the word art as "difficult", "obscure" or "intangible" but... Art is about self-expression, evoking emotions, and open interpretation. Design is about problem-solving, functionality, and clear communication. Clearly DataViz is Design.

It's "art" as in the phrase "More of an art than science"

Re: Visualizing data is an art

#64

Post by caycep » Fri, Feb 14, 2025, 6:30 PM UTC

pnut wrote: post #58

caycep wrote: post #5

this makes me nostalgic for the days when d3.js and observable made it regularly to HN front page...

Was looking for some mention of Mike Bostock and his epic odyssey into this space. For those who aren't familiar https://observablehq.com/@mbostock

yes...I haven't seen him post for some time