Lev Manovich makes some interesting observations in data visualizations. He points out that the method of representing data in a visual comes with some politics. Who decides how the data is represented? There can be many different ways of expressing data in a certain medium, but different people have different preferences of viewing things. The artist is the catalyst of his work, but human beings have a limit as to how many dimensions we can visualize in our heads. We try to compress data that spans multiple dimensions into a limited dimension medium that can give a basis for our minds to start comprehending the data. The data that we try to understand is invisible to us, it has no corporeal behavior outside our minds, and yet, few of us can withstand to process large amounts of data using only our minds.
The expression of data onto physical mediums aid our brains to arrange the data in a logical order. But the "order" depends on what aspect of the data is in focus, and generally, we focus on what is familiar to us already. This is why most of the tools and software we use include ideas that are similar in form to the non-digital world. We do this for usability, we are able to digest things are are familiar in form more quickly. But does this limit the way we perceive data?
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