Mick McQuaid

Zipdecode by Ben Fry (picture links to app's site)

I claimed previously that InfoViz history spans two eras, a Big era and a Populist era. If that is so, the prominent tools should reflect this difference. In a way, it does. Prominent, talked-about tools have changed. Spotfire and Inxight are underrepresented today, for reasons that have to do with the ownership of the data they’re used to visualize, as well as because of the social relations of the people involved in their communities. These Big systems are not designed for growth in the userbase.

The focus of current research is on different tools in the Populist era, but not entirely on new tools. There has been a clear repurposing of existing tools such as Mathematica and R, tools with long histories and strong communities, whose needs were not met outside their own communities.

Swayne (2003) contains a paragraph beginning “Within the field of statistics, graph visualization has not gotten very much attention.” This gap motivates a tool developed within a community for its own use. This tool required the thriving open source base community around R to emerge.

A similar situation can be seen with Mathematica. One of the oldest communities interested in computation is at the heart of Mathematica, the community interested in symbolic mathematics, often called Computer Algebra Systems. A large code base for this community has existed for forty years, particularly through the development of a related system known variously as Macsyma and Maxima. The Mathematica community has existed for at least twenty years as can be inferred from looking at Wolfram (1985). We are lucky to have a prominent contributing member of that community with us who may illuminate this discussion. A recent review of Mathematica at http://www.ddj.com/hpc-high-performance-computing/212201141 describes Mathematica’s “curated data” feature that enables a lot of InfoViz in the classroom. This development is a clear response to Mathematica’s customer base of educators demonstrating ways to investigate publicly available datasets.

I’m stressing the community appropriation of existing tools here, but Processing is essentially a new tool built for a new community of artists. Consider the example of Processing at the beginning of this post. In fact, go back and hit the link and play with it for five minutes before you keep reading.

Have you played with it? Good. What did you do? Did you do what I did? I entered all the zipcodes I could think of from my past addresses. I made a map of my migrations around the USA. I didn’t expect to do that. I didn’t think I needed that. But I felt I gained a valuable spatial understanding of my migrations with very little cost in time and keystrokes / mouseclicks. I think this is a hallmark of many populist viz tools. They feed emergent understanding more than planned goal achievement.

Deborah F. Swayne, Andreas Buja, Duncan Temple Lang, “Exploratory Visual Analysis of Graphs in GGobi” Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Distributed Statistical Computing (DSC 2003) March 20–22, Vienna, Austria.

STEPHEN WOLFRAM, SYMBOLIC MATHEMATICAL COMPUTATION, Communications of the ACM, April 1985, Volume 28, Number 4.

Tags: GGobi, Mathematica, Processing, R