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Graphics in Science
BishopBerkeley writes "Nature has an interesting nugget about the second meeting of the Image and Meaning Initiative which was held at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. It is about the use of graphics in presenting scientific data. I am also a big advocate of using nice graphics in scientific presentations, but I also agree with Felice Franel, the founder of I-M, that not all images are meaningful scientifically. In fact, one encounters (and I am ashamed to admit that I have published) images that look nice but have no scientific import at all. One very cool Harvard physics professor, Eric Heller, produces wickedly beautiful (and meaningful) images of quantum mechanical models. These images have made the covers of Science and Nature, and are featured in his online art gallery, which was reviewed in the New York Times in 2002." And of course, any mention of graphic information should not go by without a big shout out to Edward Tufte.
I've struggled with the same question as a computer consultant -- do images always convey anything useful just because they are based on scientific data? I've created a lot of really cool graphs and 3-D animations, but as far as analyzing the data, most times the computer is a lot better at processing multi-dimensional data than our old Mark-1 eyeball.
But there is a cool factor involved with a lot of imaging. You can't deny that.
Probably more disturbing is when images appear to convey data when they really don't. The use of false color is a great tool to bring out detail in astonomical images, but many times is misleading to the casual observer who may not understand that the images are "doped"
Is BitTorrent Next?
Here are the mirrordot links:
Nature has an interesting nugget
Image and Meaning Initiative
Eric Heller
online art gallery
New York Times
shout out to Edward Tufte
j0b.org - A famous domain name for sale
So is having access to a dictionary: "Import(IMPORTANCE) noun [U] FORMAL importance or meaning: Whether it is to be a 'working' visit or an 'official' visit is of little/no import."
Perfectly cromulent word if you ask me.
Main Entry: import Pronunciation: 'im-"pOrt, -"port Function: noun 1 : IMPORTANCE; www.m-w.com
The Design Museum in London has a whole section devoted to the presentation of information and the way bias can be introduced depending on the method selected.
They have everything from pie-charts prepared by Florence Nightingale comparing the death rates in battle vs. the field hospitals to a graphical representation of the Linux Kernel.
Well worth a look.
This reminds me of this issue:
Slate explains that the raw images from space telescopes are colored with Photoshop before they are released to the public. The 'Pillars of Creation' shows the difference that color makes. You can download the free Photoshop plug-in to color your own images.
" Why does this tufte guy get so much credit (...)"
Might have to do with the fact that he was a professor of statistics, graphic design, and political economy at Yale.
so little
Did you read his 3 main books on scientific graphics (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information; Envisioning Information; Visual Explanations)? They are very insightful books with a wealth of examples that are very inspiring.
opinions on design (...) by definition are subjective matters
Bull. This might be true if you talk about art, but we are not. You can easily do experiments that show that viewers have an easier time extracting information in a specific graphic design than in others.
once we stop kow towing to the tuftewrongs, we might get somewhere
Sure, but please show specific examples where he is wrong
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
I am a master's student in the geo-sciences and my thesis requires that i process and handle a tremendous amount of data
Most of the data that i use is spatial: topography, bathymetry, salinity concentrations..
Anyway, my point is that after i write some code to process the data
(I am developing an ecological model that tracks subsidence of marshland based on a whole bunch of environmental and geophysical parameters)
the best and easiest way for me to verify the output is reasonable is to draw a picture of it. I have spent probably 60% of my time writing software that displays the data in a graphical format.
However, this is only to verify that my data is close to accurate.. like say everything looks like it should.
You still can't beat some statistics for really checking the quality of the output.
Also, after watching a large number of presentations on theses, scientific studies, etc.. i would say that 0.05% of those presenters know nothing more of scientifc graphing than pushing buttons in xcel and seeing the nice graphics that pop up.
I mean, most of them dont even change the default graphic colors, so they are up there, talking about something and behind them is that crappy Xcel purple color.
Adobe Illustrator - for line charts use the scatter chart instead - for the same reason you would use the scatter in excel - you have more control over the x and y axis plotting over time.
.eps or using photoshop. That way the people you send it to (or documents you place it into) cant screw it up. If you are stuck with excel - always "paste special-as a picture", never simply copy and paste.
You also have an easier time saving it as a picture file of high quality, either as an
Its a bit tricky to use Adobe insead but professional medical imaging is what I do - from a graphic design standpoint - professional medical advertising. Consumer med is full of pictures of happy people cured of what ever ails them but professional med is all science, FDA approval and legal/scientific review. Every thing I do has to be checked and double checked to make sure the data points plot correctly. Adobe, especially for cross platform (I work on both mac and pc for that reason - it HAS to work) has never let me down where windows is like a 50-50 chance something will come out wrong. A bad font, line point size and always bad color.
It may take some time to learn - but you can manipulate the chart and how it looks to a much greater degree than in M$ - but you have to learn the whole app to do so -not just the chart tool.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." ~The Honorable Daniel Patrick Moynihan
i personally prefer opendx for my scientific data, it's somewhat complex but can make great navegable visualizations.
RLPlot is really nice, working towards being the opensource SigmaPlot..
... It even does error bars on coloured bar charts! (not seen that in any other graphing program on Linux, not even gnuplot). It exports nice vector graphics charts that import into Lyx nicely.
ROOT and VTK
I'm the author of an easy to use open source C++ library that helps bridge the gap between your science and a final high quality image, and I thought I might point it out, since it's relevant to the topic.
PNGwriter was originally written with scientists in mind. The need to create an image from the result of a scientific computer simulation arises as a natural part of scientific programming. Getting the data out of the program and into a high quality image in an efficient way can sometimes be hard, especially if the user is not a very experienced programmer. The methods used can often be highly inefficient or too complex to be feasible.
PNGwriter is a very easy to use open source graphics library that uses PNG as its output format. The interface has been designed to be as simple and intuitive as possible. It supports plotting and reading in the RGB (red, green, blue), HSV (hue, saturation, value/brightness) and CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) colour spaces, basic shapes, scaling, bilinear interpolation, full TrueType antialiased and rotated text support, bezier curves, opening existing PNG images and more. Documentation in English and Spanish. Runs under Linux, Unix, Mac OS X and Windows. Requires libpng and optionally FreeType2 for the text support.
It has been packaged for or is a part of Debian (stable), Ubuntu, Arch and FreeBSD.
The website is available in English, Spanish and (in summary form) in Japanese, and contains many examples, an online version of the PDF manual, a FAQ section and more.
Take a look:
http://pngwriter.sourceforge.net/
Hope you find it useful!
My motorbike travels in Chile.
gnuplot.
Really. It took me a LONG time to come to this conclusion, mainly because it scared my away with the whole "file parsing" concept, but it has tons of features, high quality output, good TeX integration.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Why does this tufte guy get so much credit for so little, much of whih is either wrong or opinions on design, which, by definition, are subjective matters.
Judging from the spelling in your post, I'm guessing this is a troll but I'll bite anyhow. One of Tufte's messages is to maximize the data-ink ratio. One way of doing that is by doing "so little" as you put it. Many of the standard plot styles (e.g., bar chart) and be redesigned slightly by removing extraneous graphical elements to make the data really stand out. So doing "so little" is an advantage. Note that it takes a lot of thought to do "so little" so implying that anyone can do it is just plain wrong.
Part of the reason I am wasting time replying to this troll is because I wanted to tell slashdot readers that if they have an interest in Tufte or this type of material that I would strongly encourage you to go to one of his seminars. I was fortunate enough to see one and it was worth every penny ($320 and that includes the price of his three books, that PowerPoint pamphlet, and the famous Napolean march poster). I was scribbling notes as fast as I could for most of the day. He will give you a very good overview of the material he covers in his books. For example, he starts off the day stating about 10-12 key principles of information design. The principles are never really listed in any of his books. They are all covered, of course, but having him rattle them off -- with examples of each -- was worth the cost right there.
I'm not one to recommend seminars and conferences. If you ask me, they are oftentimes just an excuse to get the company to pay for a semi-vacation from the office. People ought to stay in their fucking offices and get some god damn work done. But this Tufte course is a rare exception. Again, I strongly recommend taking his course if he comes to your area.
GMD
watch this
I have to add another vote for VTK. It's not ideal for 2D plots, but then there are so many packages that can do a good job of those. If you have to do any complex data representation in 3 or more dimensions however VTK is amazing, both in it's ability to produce great looking interactive plots, and in its incredible flexibility in how you trnasform and represent your data. Nothing else I'v used comes close.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Incidentally, the summary gets the name wrong. It's not Felice Franel, but Felice Frankel.