This is one of my long-standing passion projects, a simple web-based music sequencer built to have a very low barrier to entry.

There is a fundamental difference between creativity and novelty. Novelty is empirically measurable and is something an AI can do. Creativity is an expression of the human experience. It can't be outsourced.

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.

I think that data journalism is a great example of that "put it in someone's brain" idea.

I also think there are all kinds of places we're seeing more novel approaches in too: data art, physical data viz (e.g. museum exhibits), visualizing huge datasets, etc. The Climate Stripes project, maybe the most famous data viz of the last couple decades, was made by a climate scientist.

But I definitely agree that this "more experimental than rigid" side of data viz doesn't capture the majority of the field, nor should it!

1. I generally agree with you on that goal, but there are a TON of ways to convey information in a digestible way without being misleading. Even if you follow good practices.

2. "Convey" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. What are you conveying? One number? Many numbers? A specific story? As much data as possible to let the viewer find a trend themselves? Are the numbers important or the general direction of the data? Picking an answer and making the visual serve that goal is an art IMO.

So I'm not sure if you read my piece or just wanted to drop a promotion, but I think you're misrepresenting my view here. I'm not advocating for "art for the sake of art" and I certainly don't think you should not know your audience.

My main point is that I don't think all of data viz is as simple as you're implying here, i.e. that a pretty chart probably won't "resonate" or that a chart from the Tufte school of thought automatically will.

Take a project like this: https://www.dear-data.com/theproject... this is clearly data visualization and, to me, quite evocative. These visualizations aren't designed for clarity and they don't need to be, that wasn't the goal.

And thanks for the nice words about the animations! Glad to hear that work doesn't go unappreciated haha

But when done poorly, they can be a mess. Like any other chart.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42312384

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