Data Representation Quotes

Above all else show the data.

Visualizing information is a form of knowledge compression.

A picture is worth a thousand words. An interface is worth a thousand pictures.

When things are digital, they're all 1's and zero's, and so they commingle in ways we didn't anticipate and you could do things that were not like publishing or television, or computers, but were some intersection of those and that got known to be convergence, so between the switching, or trading of places and the convergence, you have today's media.

If you aren't taking a representative sample, you won't get a representative snapshot.

The key to artificial intelligence has always been the representation.

Science is the most complete presentment of facts with the least expenditure of thought

Graphical excellence is that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space.

Data and data sets are not objective; they are creations of human design. We give numbers their voice, draw inferences from them, and define their meaning through our interpretations.

I was lucky because logarithmic plots are a device of the devil.

XML is not a language in the sense of a programming language any more than sketches on a napkin are a language.

Biases and blind spots exist in big data as much as they do in individual perceptions and experiences. Yet there is a problematic belief that bigger data is always better data and that correlation is as good as causation.

There's a tendency in graphics to allow the trimming of certain parts. But I think that if you're open about your process, your methodology, such as introducing thresholds, introducing filters, techniques people use in research and data management, it's legitimate. It's legitimate to say, "We're only going to show data above this level, or between levels."

The virtue of binary is that it's the simplest possible way of representing numbers. Anything else is more complicated. You can catch errors with it, it's unambiguous in its reading, there are lots of good things about binary. So it is very, very simple once you learn how to read it.

At its most fundamental, information is a binary choice. In other words, a single bit of information is one yes-or-no choice.

Numbers can't speak for themselves, and data sets - no matter their scale - are still objects of human design.

Facts must be manipulated; some must be brightened; others shaded; yet, in the process, they must never lose their integrity.

Averages don't always reveal the most telling realities. You know, Shaquille O'Neal and I have an average height of 6 feet.

Not only is the statistical madness an assault on individuality, it's also one on temporality too. Statistics - even when accurate - are only an image of the past that can then be Photoshopped before being pasted on to the future.

A dead tree, cut into planks and read from one end to the other, is a kind of line graph, with dates down one side and height along the other, as if trees, like mathematicians, had found a way of turning time into form.

By visualizing information, we turn it into a landscape that you can explore with your eyes: a sort of information map. And when you're lost in information, an information map is kind of useful.

Scientifically, information is a choice - a yes-or-no choice. In a broader sense, information is everything that informs our world - writing, painting, music, money.

Geologists complain that when they want specimens of the common rocks of a country, they receive curious spars; just so, historians give us the extraordinary events and omit just what we want,--the every-day life of each particular time and country.

In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.

It is absolutely stunning. You cannot read numbers that communicate what the reality is. That's part of what I'm trying to get across and that's partly why I use video.