"The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see." | ||
| --John Wilder Tukey, statistician and developer of the box plot | ||
"The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures." | ||
| --Ben Shneiderman, developer of the treemap | ||
These two quotes are interesting in their juxtaposition. One tells us to draw pictures that reveal the unexpected. The other tells us that the purpose of visualization is not pictures but insight. If they were part of the same conversation, one might believe that the two famous contributors to the area of data visualization were in a disagreement.
Of course, this is not true, and these statements were made at different times and in different contexts. However, they could be part of the same conversation. One that extols us to, yes, create pictures, but not just pretty pictures; pictures that deliver insight, pictures that reveal the unexpected.
In this chapter, we are going to explore where data visualization...