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.

Comments

Graphics in Science

[Winckle]

Fianlly, an excuse to buy that 7800 GTX!

Don't Forget The Cool Factor

[DanielMarkham]

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?

Re:Don't Forget The Cool Factor

[luvirini]

Well.. complex data has to be broken down for a human to understand it.

But still.. a human eye is an extremly good tool for spotting things.. a computer can only look for the specific things you tell it to look sofr whereas an eye and a mind of someone knowledgable, will often sense something in a way that no computer can.

In most cases representing something gpahically makes that easier to grasp.

Re:Don't Forget The Cool Factor

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

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

Well, I've taken a slightly different tack in my research. While the computer might be better at actually analysing the data, visualisation can be a great tool in getting the results of that analysis to the user. In my case I've visualised the states of self learning intrusion detection systems so that the user can 'see for himself' why the system operates the way it does. Making under and overtraining and false alarms visible to an extent they weren't before.

But I agree. Even though I started out (PDF) doing straight up visualisation, I've come to believe that it's the combination of computer analysis and visualisation to better match the capabilities of the human operator and the machine that's the interesting field to explore.

Please make the story clear.

[Black Parrot]

> not all images are meaningful scientifically. In fact, one encounters [...] images that look nice but have no scientific import at all

Could you show that with a diagram or something?

Re:Please make the story clear.

[arose]

Sure, here you go.

Design Museum London

[porlw]

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.

favourite toolkit?

[spectrokid]

What is your favourite open source cross-platform toolkit for making scientific graphs?

Re:favourite toolkit?

[ghoti]

Excel

Re:favourite toolkit?

[lunadog]

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.

Coloring the Universe

[colonist]

This reminds me of this issue:

From Hubble Space Telescope pictures to the vocabulary used to describe the stars, astronomers and the media are coloring our universe, and they've been doing it for decades. While not intended to deceive, the efforts can range from the overly subjective to the absurd.

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.

Synthesis.

[torpor]

I have long lamented the lack of visual effort in interface design, specifically in the realm in which I currently work, musical synthesizers.

One of the problems with synthesis today is that it is too scientific .. and I have concluded that one of the reasons we see waves of synth revivial occurring every few years is because that is how long it takes someone to 'grok' their synthesizer, and while we wait for that grok to occur, no use occurs.

I recently made a commitment as a synth builder to attempt to enforce a few rules on myself; one of them is the "No Label Philosophy", which basically means that if a knob needs a label in order for the user to work out what it does when they turn it, then its a poor interface design, but if it doesn't, its a strong one.

The question I have is, where are other examples of 'illustration pushing concept' in the slashdott'ers world today? Have you recently seen some examples of graphical/icon-based design being used to clearly communicate very high-order concepts to the end user? What are they? Anyone got any pointers to examples of superlative graphical interface function, where you know instinctively what is going to happen because the picture tells you so?

Re:who made this tuft guy czar

[Knuckles]

" 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

Think simple and elegant.

[Assassin bug]

In my experience in science keeping graphics very simple is best. I usually hope to have the audience leave my presentations with three adjectives in mind when they critique it: simple, clean, and creative. Assuming that you have followed rules of grammar and your scientific method is sound, a simple yet innovative presentation can make a good memory. Your data will be well understood and remembered. I absolutely detest the obligatory sequence data slide that creeps into many science presentations. Surely a creative scientist will someday discover a better way to effectively communicate sequence data in a presentation. And, how many people are going to stand at your poster for 4 hours to hand-copy all of your sequence data?

Absolutely Shameless Plug

[durandal61]

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!