Lev Manovich

What is Visualization?

“I first drew the Chart in order to clear up my own ideas on the subject, finding it very
troublesome to retain a distinct notion of the changes that had taken place. I found it
answer the purpose beyond my expectation, by bringing into one view the result of details
that are dispersed over a very wide and intricate field of universal history; facts sometimes
connected with each other, sometimes not, and always requiring reflection each time they
were referred to.” William Playfair, An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and
Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations [1805]; in reference to “The Chart, No. 1, representing
the rise and fall of all nations or countries, that have been particularly distinguished for
wealth or power, is the first of the sort that ever was engraved, and has, therefore, not yet
met with public approbation.”

“The pretty photographs we and other tourists made in Las Vegas are not enough. How do
you distort these to draw a meaning for a designer? How do you differentiate on a plan
between form that is to be specifically built as shown and that which is, within constraints,
allowed to happen? How do you represent the Strip as perceived by Mr. A. rather than as a
piece of geometry? How do you show quality of light – or qualities of form – in a plan at 1
inch to 100 feet? How do you show fluxes and flows, or seasonal variation, or change with
time?” Robert Venturi, Stefan Izenour, Denise Scott Brown, Learning from Las Vegas [1972].
(Emphasis is in the original – L.M.)

“ ‘Whole’ is now nothing more than a provisional visualization which an be modified and
reversed at will, by moving back to the individual components, and then looking for yet
other tools to regroup the same elements into alternative assemblages.” Bruno Latour,
Tarde’s Idea of Quantification, The Social After Gabriel Tarde: Debates and Assessments, ed.
Mattei Candea [2009].

“Information visualization is becoming more than a set of tools, technologies and

techniques for large data sets. It is emerging as a medim in its own righ, with a wide range
of expressive potential.” Eric Rodenbeck (Stamen Design), keynote lecture at Emerging
Technology 2008 [March 4, 2008.]

“Visualization is ready to be a mass medium.” Fernanda B. Viégas and Martin Wattenberg,

an interview for infosthetics.com [May 2010].

2010. Museum of Modern Art in New York presents a dynamic visualization of

its collection on 5 screens created by Imaginary Forces. New York Times
 Manovich 2/23

regularly features custom visualizations both in its print and web editions
created by the in-house The NYTimes interactive team. The web is crawling
with numerous sophisticated visualization projects created by scientists,
designers, artists, and students. If you search for certain types of public data
the first result returned by Google search links to automatically created
interactive graph of this data. If you want to visualize our own data set, Many
Eyes, Tableau Public and other sites offer free visualization tools. 300 years
after William Playfair amazement at the cognitive power of information
visualization, it looks like that finally many others are finally getting it.
What is information visualization? Despite the growing popularity of
infovis (a common abbreviation for “information visualization”), it is not so
easy to come up with a definition which would work for all kinds of infovis
projects being created today, and at the same would clearly separate it from
other related fields such as scientific visualization and information design. So
lets start with a provisional definition that we can modify later. Lets define
information visualization as a mapping between discrete data and a visual
representation. We can also use different concepts besides “representation,”
each bringing an additional meaning. For example, if we believe that a brain
uses a number of distinct representational and cognitive modalities, we can
define infovis as a mapping from other cognitive modalities (such as
mathematical and propositional) to an image modality.
My definition does not cover all aspects of information visualization –
such as the distinctions between static, dynamic (i.e. animated) and
interactive visualization – the latter, of course, being most important today. In
fact, most definitions of infovis by computer science researchers equate it
with the use of interactive computer-driven visual representations and
interfaces. Here are the examples of such definitions: “Information
visualization (InfoVis) is the communication of abstract data through the use
of interactive visual interfaces.”1 “Information visualization utilizes computer
graphics and interaction to assist humans in solving problems.”2
Interactive graphic interfaces in general, and interactive visualization
application in particular, bring all kinds of new techniques for manipulating
data elements – from the ability to change how files are shown on the desktop

1
Keim, D.A.; Mansmann, F. and Schneidewind, J. and Ziegler, H.. “Challenges in Visual Data
Analysis”, Proceedings of Information Visualization (IV 2006), IEEE, p. 9-16, 2006.
2
Purchase, H. C., Andrienko, N., Jankun-Kelly, T. J., and Ward, M. 2008. “Theoretical
Foundations of Information Visualization”, Information Visualization: Human-Centered Issues
and Perspectives, A. Kerren, J. T. Stasko, J. Fekete, and C. North, Eds. Lecture Notes In
Computer Science, vol. 4950. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 46-64.
in modern OS to multiple coordinated views available in some visualization
software such as Mondrian.3 However, regardless of whether you are looking
at a visualization printed on paper or a dynamic arrangement of graphic
elements on your computer screen which you generated using interactive
software and which you can change at any moment, in both case the image
you are working with is a result of mapping. So what is special about images
such mapping produces? This is the focus of my article.
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 networks of relations.4 Personally, I
am not sure that this distinction holds in practice. Certainly, plenty of infovis
projects use numbers as their primary data, but even when they focus on
other data types, they still often use some numerical data as well. For instance,
typical network visualization may use both the data about the structure of the
network (which nodes are connected to each other) and the quantitative data
about the strength of these connections (for example, how many messages are
exchanged between members of a social network). As a concrete example of
infovis which combines non-numerucal and numerical data, consider a well-
known project History Flow (Fernanda B. Viégas and Martin Wattenberg,
2003) which shows how a given Wikipedia page grows over time as different
authors contribute to it.5 The contribution of each author is represented by a
line. The width of the line changes over time reflecting the amount of text
contributed by an author to the Wikipedia page. To take another infovis
classic, Flight Patterns (Aaron Koblin, 2005) uses the numerical data about the
flight schedules and trajectories of all planes that fly over US to create an
animated map which display the pattern formed by their movement over a
24-hour period.6
Rather than trying to separate information visualization and scientific
visualization using some a priori idea, lets instead enter each phrase in Google
image search and compare the results. The majority of images returned by
searching for “information visualization” are two dimensional and use vector
graphics - points, lines, curves, and other simple geometric shapes. The
majority of images returned when searching for “scientific visualization” are
3
www.theusrus.de/Mondrian/.
4
For example: “In contrast to scientific visualization, information visualization typically
deals with nonnumeric, nonspatial, and high-dimensional data.” Chen, C. “Top 10 Unsolved
Information Visualization Problems”, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 25(4):12-
16, July-Aug. 2005.
5
www.research.ibm.com/visual/projects/history_flow/.
6
http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/flightpatterns/.
 Manovich 4/23

three-dimensional; they use solid 3D shapes or volumes made from 3D points.

The results returned by these searches suggest that the two fields indeed
differ – not because they necessary use different types of data but because
they privilege different visual techniques and technologies.
Scientific visualization and information visualization come from
different cultures (science and design); their development corresponds to
different areas of computer graphics technology. Scientific visualization
developed in the 1980s along with the field of 3D computer graphics, which at
that time required specialized graphics workstations. Information
visualization developed in the 1990s along with the rise of desktop 2D
graphics software and the adoption of PCs by designers; its popularity
accelerated in 2000s – the two key factors being the easy availability of big
data sets via APIs provided by major social network services since 2005 and
new high level programming languages specifically designed for graphics (i.e.,
Processing7) and software libraries for visualization (for instance, Prefuse8).
Can we differentiate information visualization from information design?
This is more tricky, but here is my way of doing it. Information design starts
with the data that already has a clear structure, and its goal is to express this
structure visually. For example, the famous London tube map designed in
1931 by Harry Beck uses structured data: tube lines, tube stations, and their
locations over London geography.9 In contrast, the goal of information
visualization is to discover the structure of a (typically large) data set. This
structure is not known a priori; a visualization is successful if it reveals this
structure. A different way to express this is to say that information design
works with information, while information visualization works with data. As it
always the case with the actual cultural practice, it is easy to find examples
that do not fit such distinction – but a majority do. Therefore, I think that this
distinction can be useful in allowing us to understand the practices of
information visualization and information design as partially overlapping but
ultimately different in terms of their functions.
Finally, what about the earlier practices of visual display of quantitative
information in the 19th and 20th century that are known to many via the
examples collected in the pioneering books by Edward Tufte? 10 Do they
7
http://processing.org/.
8
http://prefuse.org/.
9
http://britton.disted.camosun.bc.ca/beck_map.jpg.
10
Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press,
1983. Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1990. Edward
Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Cheshire, CT:
Graphics Press, 1997. Edward Tufte, Beautiful Evidence. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2006.
constitute infovis as we understand it today? As I already noted, most
definitions provided the researchers working within Computer Science equate
information visualization with the use of interactive computer graphics.11
Using software, we can visualize much larger data sets than it was possible
previously; create animated visualization; show how processes unfold in time;
and, most importantly, manipulate visualizations interactively. These
differences are very important – but for the purposes of this article which is
concerned with the visual language of infovis they do not matter. When we
switched from pencils to computers, this did not affect the core idea of
visualization - mapping some properties of the data into a visual
representation. Similarly, while availability of computers led to the
development of new visualization techniques (scatter plot matrix, treemaps,
etc.), the basic visual language of infovis remained the same as it was in the
19th century – points, lines, rectangles and other graphic primitives. Given this
continuity, I will use the term “infovis” to refer to both earlier visual
representations of data created manually and contemporary software-driven
visualization.

Reduction and Space

In my view, the practice of information visualization from its beginnings in the

second part of the 18th century until today relied on two key 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. By employing graphical primitives (or, to use the language of
contemporary digital media, vector graphics), infovis is able to reveal patterns
and structures in the data objects that these primitives represent. However,
the price being paid for this power is extreme schematization. We throw away
%99 of what is specific about each object to represent only %1- in the hope of
revealing patterns across this %1 of objects’ characteristics.
Information visualization is not unique in relying on such extreme
reduction of the world in order to gain new power over what is extracted from
it. It comes into its own in the first part of the 19 th century when in the course
of just a few decades almost all graph types commonly found today in
11
A number of definitions of information visualization from the recent literature is
available at http://www.infovis-wiki.net/index.php?title=Information_Visualization.
 Manovich 6/23

statistical and charting programs are invented.12 This development of the new
techniques for visual reduction parallels the reductionist trajectory of modern
science in the 19th century. Physics, chemistry, biology, linguistics, psychology
and sociology propose that both natural and social world should be
understood in terms of simple elements (molecules, atoms, phonemes, just
noticeable sensory differences, etc.) and the rules of their interaction. This
reductionism becomes the default “meta-paradigm” of modern science and it
continues to rule scientific research today. For instance, currently popular
paradigms of complexity and artificial life focus our attention on how complex
structures and behavior emerge out of interaction of simple elements.
Even more direct is the link between 19th century infovis and the rise of
social statistics. Philip Ball summarizes the beginnings of statistics in this way:

In 1749 the German scholar Gottfried Achenwall suggested that since

this ‘science’ [the study of society by counting] dealt with the natural
‘states” of society, it should be called Statistik. John Sinclair, a Scottish
Presbutrian minister, liked the term well enough to introduce it into the
English language in his epic Statistical Account of Scotland, the first of
the 21 volumes of which appeared in 1791. The purveyors of this
discipline were not mathematicians, however, nor barely ‘scientists’
either; they were tabulators of numbers, and they called themselves
‘statists’.13

In the first part of the 19th century many scholars inluding Adolphe Quetelet,
Florence Nightingale, Thomas Buckle, and Francis Galton used statistics to
look for “laws of society.” This inevitably involved summarization and
reduction – calculating the totals and averages of the collected numbers about
citizens demographic characteristics, comparing the averages for different
geographical regions, asking if they followed a bell-shaped normal
distribution, etc. It is therefore not surprising that many - if not most -
graphical methods standard today were invented during this time for the
purposes of representations of such summarized data. According to Michael
Friendly and Daniel J. Denis, between 1800 and 1850, “In statistical graphics,
all of the modern forms of data display were invented: bar and pie charts,
histograms, line graphs and time-series plots, contour plots, and so forth.” 14

12
www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/milestone/sec5.html.
13
Philip Ball, Critical Mass. London: Arrow Books, 2004. Pp. 64-65.
14
Michael Friendly and Daniel J. Denis, Milestones in the History of Thematic
Cartography, Statistical Graphics, and Data Visualization, section 5 <
 Do all these different visualization techniques have something in
common besides reduction? They all use spatial variables (position, size, shape,
and more recently curvature of lines and movement) to represent key
differences in the data and reveal most important patterns and relations. This
is the second (after reduction) core principle of infovis practice as it was
practiced for 300 years - from the very first line graphs (1711), bar charts
(1786) and pie charts (1801) to their ubiquity today in all graphing software
such as Excel, Numbers, Google Docs, OpenOffice, etc.15
This principle can be rephrased as follows: infovis privileges spatial
dimensions over other visual dimensions. In other words, we map the
properties of our data that we are most interested in into topology and
geometry. Other less important properties of the objects are represented
through different visual dimensions - tones, shading patterns, colors, or
transparency of the graphical elements.
As examples, consider two common graph types: a bar chart and a line
graph. Both first appeared in William Playfair’s Commercial and Political Atlas
published in 1786 and became commonplace in the early 19 th century. A bar
chart represents the differences between data objects via rectangles that have
the same width but different heights. A line graph represents changes in the
data values over time via changing height of the line.
Another common graph type – scatter plot - similarly uses spatial
variables (positions and distances between points) to make sense of the data.
If some points form a cluster, this implies that the corresponding data objects
have something in common; if you observe two distinct clusters this implies
that the objects fall into two different classes; etc.
Lets take another example - network visualizations which function
today as distinct symbols of “network society” (see Manuel Lima’s
authoritative gallery visualcomplexity.com which currently houses over 700
network visualization projects). Like bar charts and line graphs, network
visualizations also privilege spatial dimensions: position, size, and shape.
Their key addition is the use of strait or curved lines to show connections
between data objects. For example, in distellamap (2005) Ben Fry connects
pieces of code and data by lines to show the dynamics of the software
execution in Atari 2600 games.16 In Marcos Weskamp’s Flickr Graph (2005)
the lines visualize the social relationships between users of flickr.com. 17 (Of

www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/milestone/sec5.html>.
15
The historical data is from www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/milestone/sec4.html.
16
http://benfry.com/distellamap/.
17
http://marumushi.com/projects/flickrgraph.
 Manovich 8/23

course, many other visual techniques can also be used to addition to lines to
show relations – see for instance a number of maps of science created by Katy
Borner and her colleagues at Information Visualization Lab at Indiana
University.18
I believe that the majority of information visualization practice from the
second part of the 18th century until today follow the same principle –
reserving spatial arrangement (we can call it “layout”) for the most important
dimensions of the data, and using other visual variables for remaining
dimensions. This principle can be found in visualizations ranging from famous
dense graphic showing Napoleon's March on Moscow by Charles Joseph
Minard (1869)19 to the recent The Evolution of The Origin of Species by
Stefanie Posavec and Greg McInerny (2009).20 Distances between elements
and their positions, shape, size, lines curvature, and other spatial variables
code quantitative differences between objects and/or their relations (for
instance, who is connected to whom in a social network).
When visualizations use colors, fill-in patterns, or different saturation
levels, typically this is done to partition graphic elements into groups. In other
words, these non-spatial variables function as group labels. For example,
Google Trends use line graphs to compare search volumes for different words
or phrases; each line is rendered in a different color.21 However the same
visualization could have simply used labels attached to the lines - without
different colors. In this case, color ads readability but it does not add new
information to the visualization.

The privileging of spatial over other visual dimensions was also true of plastic
arts in Europe between 16th and 19th centuries. A painter first worked out the
composition for a new work in many sketches; next, the composition was
transferred to a canvas and shading was fully developed in monochrome. Only
after that color was added. This practice assumed that the meaning and
emotional impact of an image depends most of all on the spatial arrangements
of its parts, as opposed to colors, textures and other visual parameters. In
classical Asian “ink and wash painting” which first appeared in 7th century in
China and was later introduced to Korea and then Japan (14 th century), color
did not even appeared. The painters used exclusively black ink exploring the

18
http://ivl.slis.indiana.edu/research/.
19
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/minard.
20
www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=696.
21
www.google.com/trends.
contrasts between objects contours, their spatial arrangements, and different
types of brushstrokes.
It is possible to find information visualizations where the main
dimension is color –for instance, a common traffic light which “visualizes” the
three possible behaviors of a car driver: stop, get ready, go. This example
shows that if we fix spatial parameters of visualization, color can become the
salient dimension. In other words, it is crucial that the three lights have
exactly the same shape and size. Apparently, if all elements of the visualization
have the same values on spatial dimensions, our visual system can focus on
the differences represented by colors, or other non-spatial variables.
Why do visualization designers – be they the inventors of graph and
chart techniques at the end of the 18th and early 19th century, or millions of
people who now use these graph types in their reports and presentations, or
the authors of more experimental visualizations featured on
infoaesthetics.com and visualcomplexity.com - privilege spatial variables over
other kinds of visual mappings? In other words, why color, tone, transparency,
and symbols are used to represent secondary aspects of data while the spatial
variables are reserved for the most important dimensions? Without going into
the details into the rich but still very incomplete knowledge about vision
accumulated by neuroscience and experimental psychology, we can make a
simple guess. The creators of visualizations follow human visual perception
that also privileges spatial arrangements of parts of a scene over its other
visual properties in making sense of this scene. Why would the geometric
arrangement of elements in a scene be more important to human perception
than other visual dimensions? Perhaps this has to do with the fact that each
object occupies a unique part of the space. Therefore it is crucial for a brain to
be able to segments a 3D world into spatially distinct objects which are likely
to have distinct identities (people, sky, ground, cards, buildings, etc. Different
object types can also be often identified with unique 2D forms and
arrangements of these forms. A tree has a trunk and branches; a human being
has a head, a torso, arms and legs; etc. Therefore identifying 2D forms and
their arrangements is also likely to play an important role in object
recognition.
An artist or a designer may pay more attention to other visual
properties of a scene such as textures and rhythms of color (think of twentieth
century art) – but in a everyday perception, spatial properties are what
matters most. How close are two people to each other; the expression on their
faces; their relative size which allows the observer to estimate their distance
from her; the characteristic shapes of different objects which allows her to
 Manovich 10/23

recognize them – all these and many other spatial characteristics which our
brains instantly compute from the retinal input are crucial for our daily
existence.
I think that this key of spatial variables for human perception maybe the
reason why all standard techniques for making graphs and charts developed
in the 18th – 20th centuries use spatial dimensions to represent the key aspects
of the data, and reserve other visual dimensions for less important aspects.
However, we should also keep in mind the evolution of visual display
technologies, which constrain what is possible at any given time. Only in the
1990s when people started using computers to design and present
visualizations on computer monitors, color become the norm. Color printing
is still significantly more expensive than using a single color – so even today
science journals are printed in black and white. Thus, the extra cost
associated with creating and printing color graphics during the last two
centuries was probably an important factor responsible for privileging of
spatial variables.
When color, shading, and other non-spatial visual parameters were used
in visualizations created in the 19th and most of the 20th century, they usually
represented only small number of discrete values – i.e. they acted as
“categorical variables.” However today the fields of computer-based scientific
visualization, geovisualization, and medical imaging often use such
parameters with much larger scales. Since today computers commonly
allocate 8-bits to store values for each of red, green and blue channels,
computers monitors can show 16 million unique colors. Therefore color,
shading and transparency are now commonly employed in these fields to
show continuously varying qualities such temperature, gas density, elevation,
gravity waves, etc. Does not this contradict my statement that spatial
arrangement is key to information visualization?
We can solve this puzzle if we take into account a fundamental
difference between information visualization and scientific visualization /
geovisualization, which I did not yet mention. Infovis uses arbitrary spatial
arrangements of elements to represent the relationships between data
objects. Scientific, medical and geovisualization typically work with a priori
fixed spatial layout of the real physical objects such as a brain, a coastline, a
galaxy, etc. Since the layout in such visualizations is already fixed and can’t be
arbitrary manipulated, color and/or other non-spatial parameters are used
instead to show new information. A typical example of this strategy is a heat
map which use color hue and saturation to overlay information over a spatial
map.22

The two key principles that I suggested – data reduction and privileging of
spatial variables - do not account for all possible visualizations produced
during last 300 years. However, they are sufficient to separate infovis (at least
as it was commonly practiced until now) from other techniques and
technologies for visual representation: maps, engraving, drawing, oil painting,
photography, film, video, radar, MRI, infrared spectroscopy, etc. They give
infovis its unique identity – the identity which remained remarkably
consistent for almost 300 years, i.e. until the 1990s.

Visualization Without Reduction

The meanings of the word “visualize” include “make visible” and “make a
mental image.” This implies that until we “visualize” something, this
“something” does not have a visual form. It becomes an image through a
process of visualization.
If we survey the practice of infovis from the 18th until the end of the 20th
century, the idea that visualization takes data that is not visual and maps it
into a visual domain indeed works quite well. However, it seems to longer
adequately describe certain new visualization techniques and projects
developed since the middle of the 1990s. Although these techniques and
projects are commonly discussed as “information visualization,” is it possible
that they actually represent something else – a fundamentally new
development in the history of representational and epistemological
technologies, or at least a new broad visualization method for which we don’t
yet have an adequate name.
Consider a technique called tag cloud.23 The technique was popularized
by Flickr in 2005 and today it can be found on numerous web sites and blogs.
A tag cloud shows most common words in a text in the font size
corresponding to their frequency in the text.
We can use a bar chart with text labels to represent the same
information - which in fact may work better if the word frequencies are very

22
One important case which does not fit my analysis is the use of different tones or colors
to represent terrain elevation and relief in printed topographic maps already in the 18 th
century. In these maps, tone or color codes qualitative data rather than categories.
23
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud.
 Manovich 12/23

similar. But if the frequencies fall within a larger range, we don’t have to map
the data into a new visual representation such as the bars. Instead, we can
vary the size of the words themselves to represent their frequencies in the
text.
Tag cloud exemplifies a broad method that can be called media
visualization: creating new visual representations from the actual visual media
objects, or their 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.
In view of our discussion of data reduction principle, 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. For instance, text cloud reduces the
size of text to a small number of most frequently used words. However, this is
a reduction that is quantitative rather than qualitative. We don’t substitute
media objects by new objects (i.e. graphical primitives typically used in
infovis), which only communicate selected properties of these objects (for
instance, bars of different lengths representing word frequencies). My phrase
“visualization without reduction” refers to this preservation of a much richer
set of properties of data objects when we create visualizations directly from
them.

Not all direct visualization techniques such as a tag cloud originated in the 21 st
century. If we project this concept retroactively into history, we can find
earlier techniques that use the same idea. For instance, a familiar book index
can be understood as a direct visualization technique. Looking at a book’s
index one can quickly see if particular concepts or names are important in the
book – they will have more entries; less important concepts will take up only a
single line.
While both book index and tag cloud exemplify direct visualization
method, it is important to consider the differences between them. The older
book index technique relied on the typesetting technology used for printing
books. Since each typeface was only available in a limited number of sizes, the
idea that you can precisely map the frequency of a particular word into its font
size was counter-intuitive – so it was not invented. In contrast, tag cloud
technique is a typical expression of what we can call “software thinking” – i.e.
the ideas that explore the fundamental capacities of modern software. Tag
cloud explores the capacities of software to vary every parameter of a
representation and to control it using external data. The data can come from a
scientific experiment, from a mathematical simulation, from the body of the
person in an interactive installation, from calculating some properties of the
data, etc. If we take these two capacities for granted, the idea to arbitrary
change the size of words based on some information - such as their frequency
in a text - is something we may expect to be “actualized” in the process of
cultural evolution. (In fact, all contemporary interactive visualization
techniques rely on the same two fundamental capacities.)
The rapid growth in the number and variety of visualization projects,
software applications, and web services since the late 1990s was enabled by
the advances in computer graphics capacities of PCs including both hardware
(processors, RAM, displays) and software (C and Java graphics libraries, Flash,
Processing, Flex, Prefuse, etc.) These developments both popularized
information visualization and also fundamentally changed its identity by
foregrounding animation, interactivity and also more complex visualizations
that represent connections between many more objects than previously.24 But
along with these three highly visible trends, the same advances also made
possible “direct visualization” approach – although it has not been given its
own name so far.

Direct Visualization: Examples

Lets discuss three well-known projects which exemplify “direct visualization”:

Listening Post, Cinema Redux, and Preservation of Selected Traces.25
Cinema Redux was created by interactive designer Brendan Dawes in
26
2004. Dawes wrote a program in Processing that sampled a film at the rate
of one frame per second and scaled each frame to 8x6 pixels. The program
then arranged these minuate frames in a rectangular grid with every row
representing a single minute of the film. Although Dawes could have easily
continue this process of sampling and remapping – for instance, representing
24
As an example, open soource data visualization software Mondrian 1.0 running on my
2009 Apple PowerBook laptop with 2.8 Ghz processor and 4 GB of RAM takes
approximately 7 seconds to render a scatter plot containing 1 million points.
25
Many additional examples of direct visualization can be found in the field of motion
graphics - film and TV titles and graphics, commercials, and music videos. In many motion
graphics, text or images are animated to create dynamically changing meaningful patterns
made from these media objects.
26
http://www.brendandawes.com/sketches/redux/
 Manovich 14/23

each frame though its dominant color - he chose instead to use the actual
scaled down frames from the film. The resulting visualization represents a
trade-off between the two possible extremes: preserving all the details of the
original artifact and abstracting its structure completely. Higher degree of
abstraction may make the patterns in cinematography and narrative more
visible but it would also remove the viewer further from the experience of the
film. Staying closer to the original artifact preserves the original detail and
aesthetic experience but may not be able to reveal some of the patterns.
What is important in the context of our discussion are not the particular
parameters which Dawes used for Cinema Redux but that he reinterpreted the
previous constant of visualization practice as a variable. Previously infovis
designers mapped data into new diagrammatic representation consisting
from graphical primitives. This was the default practice. With computers, a
designer can select any value on the “original data” / abstract representation
dimension.. In other words, a designer can now chose to use graphical
primitives, or the original images exactly as they are, or any format in
between. Thus, while the project’s titles refers to the idea of reduction, in the
historical content of earlier infovis practice it can be actually understood as
expansion – i.e. expanding typical graphical primitives (points, rectangles,
etc.) into the actual data objects (film frames).
Before software, visualization usually involved the two-stage process of
first counting, or quantifying data, and then representing the results
graphically. Software allows for direct manipulation of the media artifacts
without quantifying them. As demonstrated by Cinema Redux, these
manipulations can successfully make visible the relations between a large
number of these artifacts. Of course, such visualization without quantification
is made possible by the a priori quantification required to turn any analog
data into a digital representation. In other words, it is the “reduction” first
performed by the digitization process which paradoxically now allows us to
visualize the patterns across sets of analog artifacts without reducing them to
graphical signs.

For another example of direct visualization, let’s turn to Ben Fry’s

Preservation of Selected Traces (2009).27 This web project is an interactive
animation of the complete text of Darwin’s Evolution of the Species. Fry uses
different colors to show the changes made by Darwin in each of six editions of
his famous book. As the animation plays, we see the evolution of the book text
from edition to edition, with sentences and passages deleted, inserted and re-
27
http://benfry.com/traces/.
written. In contrast to typical animated information visualizations which
show some spatial structure constantly changing its shape and size in time
reflecting changes in the data (for example, changing structure of a social
network over time), in Fry’s project the rectangular shape containing the
complete text of Darwin’s book always stays the same – what changes is its
content. This allows us to see how over time the pattern of book’s additions
and revisions become more and more intricate, as the changes from all the
editions accumulate.
At any moment in the animation we have access to the compete text of
Darwin’s book - as opposed to only diagrammatic representation of the
changes. At the same time, it can be argued that that Preservation of Selected
Traces does involve some data reduction. Given the typical resolution of
computer monitors and web bandwidth today, Fry was not able to actually
show all the actual book text at the same time.28 Instead sentences are
rendered as tiny rectangles in different colors. However, when you mouse
over any part of the image, a pop-up window shows the actual text. Because
all the text of Darwin’s book is easily accessible to the user in this way, I think
that this project can be considered an example of direct visualization.

Let’s add one more example – Listening Post by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen
(2001).29 Usually this work is considered to be a computer-driven installation
– rather than an example of infovis. Listening Post pulls text fragments from
online chat rooms in real-time based on various parameters set by the authors
and streams them across a display wall made from a few hundred small
screens in a six-act looping sequence. Each act uses its own distinct spatial
layout to arrange dynamically changing text fragments. For instance, in one
act the phrases move across the wall in a wave-like pattern; in another act
words appear and disappear in a checkerboard pattern. Each act also has its
distinct sound environment driven by the parameters extracted from the
same text that is being animated on the display wall.
One can argue that Listening Post is not a visualization because the
spatial patterns are pre-arranged by the authors and not driven by the data.
This argument makes sense – but I think it is important to keep in mind that

28
I have created a few visualizations which show a whole book in a single image - see
http://www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/sets/72157615900916808/;
http://www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/sets/72157622994317650/. To display the
whole text of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in a smallest font which can be read, I had to make
14,000 x 6,000 pixels – well beoynd the normal screen resolution today.
29
http://www.earstudio.com/projects/listeningpost.html.
 Manovich 16/23

while layouts are pre-arranged, the data in these layouts is not – it is a result
of the real-time data mining of the web. So while the text fragments are
displayed in pre-defined layouts (wave, checkerboard, etc.), because the
content of these fragments is always different, the overall result is also always
unique.
Note that if the authors were to represent the text via abstract graphical
elements, we would simply end up with the same abstract pattern in every
repetition of a act. But because they show the actual text that changes all the
time, the patterns that emerges inside the same layout are always different.
This is why I consider Listening Post to be a perfect representative of
direct visualization method – the patterns it presents depend as much on
what all text fragments which appear on screen wall actually say as on their
pre-defined composition. We can find other examples of info projects that
similarly flow the data into pre-defined layouts. Manuel Lima identified what
he calls a “syntax” of network visualizations – commonly used layouts such as
radial convergence, arc diagrams, radial centralized networks, and others. 30
The key difference between most of these network visualizations and
Listening Post lies in the fact that the former often rely on the existing
visualization layout algorithms. Thus they implicitly accept ideologies behind
these layouts – in particular the tendency to represent a network as a highly
symmetrical and/or circular structure. The authors of Listening Post wrote
their own layout algorithms that allowed them to control the layouts’
intended meanings. It is also important that they use six very different layouts
that cycle over time. The meaning and aesthetic experience of this work –
showing both the infinite diversity of the web and at the same time the
existence of many repeating patterns – to a significant extent derive from the
temporal contrasts between these layouts. Eight year before Bruno Latour’s
article (quoted in the beginning) where Latour agues that our ability to create
“a provisional visualization which can be modified and reversed” allows us to
think differently since any “whole” we can construct now is just one of
numerous others, Listening Post beautifully staged this new epistemological
paradigm enabled by interactive visualization.

The three influential projects I considered demonstrate that in order to

highlight patterns in the data we don’t have to reduce it by representing data
objects via abstract graphical elements. We also don’t have to summarize the
data as it is common in statistics and statistical graphics – think, for instance,
To see his taxonomy of network display methods, select “filter by method” on
30

www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/.
of a histogram which divides data into a number of bins. This does not means
that in order to qualify as a “direct visualization” an image has to show all
%100 of the original data – every word in a text, every frame in a movie, etc.
Out of the three examples I just discussed, only Preservation of Selected Traces
does this. Both Cinema Redux and Listening Post do not use all the available
data – instead they sample it. The first project samples a feature film at the
fixed rate of 1 frame per second; the second project filters the online
conversations using set criteria that change from act to act. However, what is
crucial is that the elements of these visualizations are not the result of
remapping of the data into some new representation format – they are the
original data objects selected from the complete data set. This strategy is
related to the traditional rhetorical figure of synecdoche - specifically its
particular case where a specific class of thing refers to a larger more general
class.31 (For example, in Cinema Redux one frame stands for a second of a
film.)
While sampling is a powerful technique for revealing patterns in the
data, Preservation of Selected Traces demonstrates that it is also possible to
revealing patterns while keeping %100 of the data. But you already have
been employing this strategy - if you ever used a magic marker to highlight
important passages of a printed text. Although text highlighting normally is
not thought as visualization, we can see that in fact it is an example of “direct
visualization without sampling.”
Cinema Redux and Preservation of Selected Traces also break away from
the second key principle of traditional visualization - communication of
meaning via spatial arrangements of the elements. In both projects, the layout
of elements is dictated by the original order of the data - shots in a film,
sentences in a book. This is possible and also appropriate because the data
they visualize is not the same as the typical data used in infovis. A film or a
book is not just a collection of data objects - they are narratives made from
these objects (i.e. the data has a sequential order). Although it is certainly
possible to create effective visualizations that remap a narrative sequence into
a completely new spatial structure as in Listening Post (see also Writing
Without Words by Stefanie Posavec32 and The Shape of Song by Martin
Wattenberg33), Cinema Redux and Preservation of Selected Traces demonstrate
that preserving the original sequences is also effective.

31
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche.
32
http://www.itsbeenreal.co.uk/index.php?/wwwords/about-this-project/.
33
http://www.turbulence.org/Works/song/.
 Manovich 18/23

Preserving the original order of data is particularly appropriate in the

case of cultural data sets that have a time dimension. We can call such data
sets “cultural time series.” Whether it is a feature film (Cinema Redux), a book
(Preservation of Selected Traces) or a long Wikipedia article (History Flow), the
relationships between the individual elements (film shots, book’s sentences)
and also between larger parts of a work (film scenes, book’s paragraphs and
chapters) separated in time are of primary importance to the work’s
evolution, meaning, and its experience by the users. While we consciously or
unconsciously notice many of these patterns during watching / reading /
interacting with the work, projecting time into space - laying out movie frames,
book sentences, magazine pages in a single image - gives us new possibilities
to study them. Thus, space turns to play a crucial role in direct visualization
after all: it allows us to see patterns between media elements that are normally
separated by time.

Let me add to this discussion a few more examples of direct visualization

created at my lab - Software Studies Initiative (softwarestudies.com).34
Inspired by the artistic projects which pioneered direct visualization approach
as well by the resolution and real-time capabilities of supervisualization
interactive systems such as HIPerSpace (35,840 by 8,000
pixels, 286,720,000 pixels total35) developed at California Institute for
Telecommunication and Information (Calit2)36 where our lab is located, my
group has been working on techniques and software to allow interactive
exploration of large sets of visual cultural data. Some of the visualizations we
created use the same strategy as Cinema Redux – arranging a large set of
images in a rectangular grid. However, having access to a very high resolution
display sometimes allows us to include all %100 of data – as opposed to
having to sample it. For example, we created an image showing 4553 covers of
every issue of Time magazine published between 1923 and 2009 (Mapping
Time, Jeremy Douglass and Lev Manovich, 2009).37 We also compared the use
of images in Science and Popular Science magazines by visualizing
apporimately 10,000 pages from each magazine during first decades of their
publication (The Shape of Science, William Huber, Lev Manovich, Tara Zapel,
2010).38 Our most data-intensive direct visualization is the 44,000 by 44,000

34
http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/09/cultural-analytics.html.
35
http://vis.ucsd.edu/mediawiki/index.php/Research_Projects:_HIPerSpace.
36
www.calit2.net.
37
http://www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/4038907270/in/set-72157624959121129/.
38
http://www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/sets/72157623862293839/.
pixels; it shows 1,074,790 Manga pages organized by their stylistic properties
(Manga Style Space, Lev Manovich and Jeremy Douglass, 2010).39
Like Cinema Redux, Mapping Time and The Shape of Science make equal
the values of spatial variables to reveal the patterns in the content, colors, and
compositions of the images. All images are displayed at the same size
arranged into a rectangular grid according to their original sequence.
Essentially, these direct visualization use only one dimension – with the
sequence of images wrapped around into a number of rows to make it easier
to see the patterns without having to visually scan very long image. However,
we can turn such one-dimensional image timelines into 2D, with the second
dimension communicating additional information. Consider a 2D timeline of
Time covers we created (Timeline, Jeremy Douglass and Lev Manovich,
2009).40 Horizontal axis is used to position images in the original sequence:
time runs from left to right, and every cover is arranged according to its
publication date. The positions on the vertical axis represent new information
– in this case, average saturation (the perceived intensity of colors) of every
cover which we measured using image analysis software.
Such mapping is particularly useful for showing variation in the data
over time. We can see how color saturation gradually increases during Time
publication reaching its peak in 1968. The range of all values (i.e., variance)
per year of publication also gradually increases – but it reaches its maximum
value a few years earlier. It is perhaps not surprising to see that the intensity
(or “aggressiveness”) of mass media as exemplified by Time covers gradually
raises up to the end of the 1960s as manifested by changes in saturation and
contrast. What is unexpected, however, is that since the beginning of the 21 st
century, this trend is reversed: the covers now have less contrast and less
saturation.
The strategy used in this visualization is based on the familiar technique
– a scatter graph. However, if a normal scatter graph reduces the data
displaying each object as a point, we display the data in its original form. The
result is new graph type, which is literally made from images - that’s why it is
appropriate to call it an “image graph.”41
39
http://www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/4497385883/in/set-72157624959121129/.
40
http://www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/3951496507/in/set-72157622525012841/.
41
A number of computer scientists have explored a related technique for browsing image
collection where a part of a collection is displayed in a similar “image graph” form. (For a
summary of this work, see S. Marchand-Maillet, E. Bruno, State of the Art Image Collection
Overviews and Browsing (2006), p. 5. <www.multimatch.org/docs/publicdels/D1.1.2.pdf>.
In most of the reported research, images are organized by visual similarity which is
calculated via computer image analysis. While this strategy is often useful for the analysis
 Manovich 20/23

What is Visualization?

In an article on then emerging practice of artistic visualization written in 2002

I defined visualization as “a transformation of quantified data which is not
visual is into a visual representation.” At that time I wanted to stress that
visualization participates in the reduction projects of modern science and
modern art which led to the choice of the article’s title: “Data Visualization as
New Abstraction and Anti-Sublime.42 I think that this emphasis was
appropriate given the types of infovis typically created at that time. (Although
I used somewhat different formulation for the definition that appears in the
beginning of the present article – “a remapping from other codes to a visual
code” - the two definitions express the same idea).
Most information visualization today continues to employ graphical
primitives. However, as the examples we looked at demonstrate, alongside
this “mainstream” infovis, we can find another trend - projects where the data
being visualized is already visual – text, film frames, magazine covers. In other
words, these projects create new visual representations our of the original
visual data without translating it into graphic signs. They also often break
away from the second key principle of infovis - mapping of most important
data dimensions into spatial variables.
So is “direct visualization” actually constitutes a form of infovis, or is it a
different method altogether? We have two choices. Either we need to accept
that this is something fundamentally different. Alternatively, we can revise
our understanding of what infovis is.
Given that all direct visualizations we looked at aim to make visible
patterns and relations in the data, this aim certainly aligns them with infovis
as it developed during last 300 years. It is also relevant to note that some of
the of most well-known infovis projects of the last 15 years follow direct
visualization approach. This is true of Cinema Redux and Preservation of
Selected Traces and other seminal projects which I did not discussed in detail
such as Talmud Project (David Small, 1999), Valence (Ben Fry, 2001) and
TextArc (W. Bradford Paley, 2002). This means that people intuitively identify

of cultural patterns, in many cases such as Time covers analysis we want to see how visual
features vary over time. Therefore we use original metadata (i.e dates of publication) for
one axis and measurement of one or more visual features (in this case, saturation) for the
second axis.
42
The article is available at www.manovich.net.
them as infovis even though they consist not from vector elements but from
media (text or images). In another example, a Phrase Net technique which was
developed by Frank van Ham, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas and
awarded “Best Paper” at IEEE InfoVis 2009 conference also operates within a
direct visualization paradigm.43
Does this mean that what we took to be the core principle of
information visualization during its first three centuries – reduction to
graphic primitives – was only a particular historical choice, an artifact of the
available graphics technologies? I think so. Similarly, the privileging of spatial
variables over other visual parameters may also turn out to be a historically
specific strategy – rather than the essential principle of infovis. The relatively
new abilities brought by computer graphics to precisely control – that is, asign
values within a large range - color, transparency, texture, and any other visual
parameter of any part of an image allows us to start using these non-spatial
parameters to represent the key dimensions of the data. This is already
common in scientific, medical and geovisualization – but not yet in
information visualization.
Why has infovis continued to rely on computer-generated vector
graphics during 1990s and 2000s when the speed with which computers can
render images has been progressively increasing? Perhaps the main factor has
been the focus on the World Wide Web as the preferred platform for
delivering interactive visualization. The web technologies made it relatively
easy to create vector graphics and stream video - but not to render large
numbers of continuous tone (i.e., raster) images in real-time. This required a
use of graphics workstation, a high-end PC with a special graphics card or a
game console with optimized graphics processors, as well as time-consuming
software development. Although video games and 3D animation programs
could render impressive numbers of pixels in real-time, this was achieved by
writing code that directly accesses hardware – something that very high-level
media programming environments such as Processing and Flash/Flex could
not do.
However, as the processing power and RAM size keep increasing, these
differences between the graphics capacities of various hardware platforms
and software are gradually disappearing. For example, ImagePlot44 program
which I wrote in 2009 using high-level programming environment of imageJ

43
Frank van Ham, Martin Wattenberg, Fernanda B. Viégas, Mapping Text with Phrase Nets,
IEEE InfoVis 2009.
44
www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/sets/72157617847338031/.
 Manovich 22/23

(open source application for image processing commonly used in the

sciences45) can render a 30000x4000 pixels image which shows 4535 Time
covers in a few minutes on my Powerbook laptop (processor: 2.8 Ghz Intel
Core 2 Duo; memory: 4GB 1067 Mhz DDR3). (Most of the time is spend on
scaling down all the covers.) VisualSense46 software that we developed in
2009-2010 with National University of Singapore’s Multimodal Analysis Lab
using Flash/Flex allows a user to define a number of graphs and change their
positions and sizes. The graphs can use vector primitives (points, circles,
rectangles) or they can show the actual images – thus allowing for interactive
construction of direct visualizations. (Depending of the computer
specificatins, it can handle between 500 and 1000 images without slowing
down.) Finally, the HiperView47 application we developed (also in 2009)
together with Calit2 Center of Graphics, Visualization and Virtual Reality
(GRAVITY) takes advantages of the 286 megapixel resolution and significant
memory of HIPerSpace to enable real-time interactive manipulation of image
graphs which can contain up to 4000 images of any size.
I believe that direct visualizations method will be particularly important
for humanities, media studies and cultural institutions which now are just
beginning to discoverer the use of visualization but which eventually may
adopt it as a basic tool for research, teaching and exhibition of cultural
artifacts. (The first conference on visualization in humanities took place at The
MIT in May 201048). Humanists always focused on analyzing and interpreting
details of the cultural texts, be they poems, paintings, music compositions,
architecture, or, more recently, computer games, generative artworks, and
interactive environments. This is one of the key differences between
humanities and sciences - at least, as they were practiced until now. The
former are interested in particular artifacts (which can be taken to exemplify
larger trends); the latter are interested in general laws and models.
If humanists start systematically using visualization for research,
teaching and public presentation of cultural artifacts and processes, the ability
to show the artifacts in full detail is crucial. Displaying the actual visual media
as opposed to representing it by graphical primitives helps the researcher to
understand meaning and/or cause behind the pattern she may observe, as
well as discover additional patterns.
While graphical reduction will continue to be used, this no longer the

45
http://rsbweb.nih.gov/ij/.
46
www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/sets/72157623553747882/.
47
http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/09/cultural-analytics.html.
48
hyperstudio.mit.edu/h-digital/.
only possible method. The development of computers and the progress in
their media capacities and programming environments now makes possible a
new method for visualization that I called “direct visualization” – i.e.,
visualization without reduction.49

[March - October 2010]

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Software Studies Initiative research reported in this article was made possible
by the generous support provided by California Institute for
Telecommunication and Information (Calit2), UCSD’s Center for Research in
Computing and the Arts (CRCA), UCSD Chancellor office, and National
Endowment of Humanities (NEH). The development of VisualSense software
was supported by Mapping Asian Cultures Grant from University Research
Council, National University of Singapore.

49
It is possible however that our interactive interfaces to visualizations are effective
precisely because they do provide certain reduction functions. I am thinking in partcular
about zoom command. We zoom into direct visualization such as Time covers to examine
the details of particular covers. We zoom our to see the overall trends. When we do that,
the images are gradually reduced in size eventually becomong small color dots.