28/10/2010 Research: Lev Manovich Coins the Ter…

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Research: Lev Manovich Coins the Term 'Media Visualization'

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Thu 28 October 2010 at 4:31 PM infographic / infovis / research add to the no com m ents yet Visualizing Data using Long-Tim e Exposure Photos »
by infosthetics save or share this post « Depicting the Cosm ology behind the Big Bang as a Light

New media theorist Lev Manovich just released a new text, titled What is Visualization? adv ertise here »

[manovich.net]. One might first wonder if such a question is not too... obvious, but in the light of the
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contentious discussion about the tension between artistic and scientific representations of data, and
whether data art should be called visualization at all, it is always worth covering the basics.

The text is quite substantial, so you might want to wait for some quiet time to dive into it. The main
arguments in the text focus around distinguishing information visualization, scientific visualization and
information design. In addition, Lev proposes a new term, "media visualization", for those visual
representations that do not reduce data into topology and geometry, but instead uses techniques to
reorganize data into a new visual representation that preserves its original form. Examples of media
visualization include tag clouds, Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen's Listening Post, Brendan Dawes'
Cinema Redux, and Ben Fry's Preservation of Selected Traces. These projects highlight patterns in
the data without reducing it by mapping data values into abstract graphical elements, or summarizing it
through statistics and statistical graphics. Instead, such visualizations preserve the original visual form ABOUT 1,000 POSTS AGO...
of the data, or sample it when it is too large or numerous.

In addition, Lev Manovich describes 3 visualization projects developed in his lab: ImagePlot,
VisualSense and HiperView.

For those with little time, I took out following bits:

"For some researchers, information visualization is distinct from scientific visualization in that the latter
uses numerical data while the former uses non-numeric data such as text and network s of relations."
I originally thought the conceptual difference was that data/information visualization deals with
'abstract' data, that is data that has no physical presence in reality and requires a visual metaphor to be
perceived, let alone understood. Scientific visualization, in turn, deals with physical reality and its
visual simulation.

Well, let's skip this misunderstanding, and continue to the real bits... SHOP BOOKS

"Information design starts with the data that already has a clear structure, and its goal is to express this
structure visually. ... A different way to express this is to say that information design work s with
information, while information visualization work s with data. "

"In my view, the practice of information visualization .... relied on two k ey principles. The first principle
is reduction. Infovis uses graphical primitives such as points, strait lines, curves, and simple geometric
shapes to stand in for objects and relations between them - regardless of whether these are people,
their social relations, stock prices, income of nations, unemployment statistics, or anything else. ...
Data Flow : Beautiful Data: The Visual
(The second principle is the use of...) spatial variables (position, size, shape, and more recently Visualising The Stories Behind Miscellaneum
curvature of lines and movement) to represent k ey differences in the data and reveal most important Information in Elegant Data Solutions David McCandless
Graphic Design for Design
patterns and relations." Klanten et al.

"However, it seems to longer adequately describe certain new visualization techniques and projects inform ation aesthetics shop »

developed since the middle of the 1990s. ... Tag cloud exemplifies a broad method that can be called
INFOGRAPHIC PRINTS
media visualization: creating new visual representations from the actual visual media objects, or their

infosthetics.com/…/lev_manovich_me… 1/2
28/10/2010 Research: Lev Manovich Coins the Ter…
parts. Rather than representing text, images, video or other media though new visual signs such as
points or rectangles, media visualizations build new representations out of the original media. Images
remain images; text remains text. ... we can also call this method direct visualization, or visualization
without reduction. In direct visualization, the data is reorganized into a new visual representation that
preserves its original form. Usually, this does involve some data transformation such as changing data
size. "

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