Abstract

The comprehension of phenomena by analyzing and exploring data collected for the purpose is an old and established practice. Statistical methods have become quite sophisticated and are the bedrock of much modern scientific enquiry. Ever since William Playfair introduced the line, area, and bar charts and the pie chart and circle graph to the world, the field of information visualization research has refined and extended his ideas and has developed rules and heuristics for the visual representation of data. In all of this, it is not evident that the ontological nature of vision has been taken into account. And why would it be? Phenomenologists and anthropologists have presented varied and competing theories as to how we perceive the world visually, but it seems that much of that can be bracketed when it comes to choosing how to lay out a plot or a chart.