If you spend much of your time in meetings, chances are you’ve been confronted with a slide that attempts to tell a story. It might look something like Peter Norvig’s witty reduction of Lincoln’s thrilling Gettysburg Address to a soporific PowerPoint deck. The examples we see in corporate conference rooms now are less funny but just as useless.
One of the few positive side effects of this era’s information overload is that we’ve found some new and useful ways to organize the avalanche of information that drops onto us every day. Roughly a quarter century after the publication of Edward R. Tufte’s instant classic, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, we’re still in the early stages of learning how displaying complex data in clever, clarifying ways can increase understanding and improve resulting decisions.
Information visualizations are not about pretty pictures. Indeed, the ones that are most decorative are often the ones that yield the least useful information to share and act on. Much of making smart business decisions is deciding which data sources are trustworthy and which visualizations of those data sources tell stories that clarify and reveal what’s behind the always-moving, Matrix-like walls of numbers. Achieving visual literacy helps business people decide which stories and believable and make better decisions.
In the new issue of Release 2.0, our all-star lineup examines the state of information visualization, how it got here, and where it might be going.
Jerry Michalski returns to this newsletter after a much-too-long absence. He points to some of the most probing examples of information visualization nowadays, details his own decade-long involvement with one InfoVis program, senses some early signals on how these disparate visualizations might one day interoperate, and delivers his own wish list for the future. Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability, warns us not to get carried away with today’s InfoVis tools. And, finally, David Weinberger, author of Everything Is Miscellaneous, reminds us that sometimes (think: Gettysburg Address) words may be all you need to make your point.
You can find out more about the new issue here.