Info We Trust

by R J Andrews

  The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.

  LAKOFF AND JOHNSON, 1980

  Metaphor is the bridge from the safety of the familiar to the excitement of the new. It powers sophisticated thought by helping us engage with, comprehend, and communicate abstract ideas. For visual storytellers, metaphor helps link ideas and what we see.

  Metaphor is from the Greek words meta (over and above) and pherein (to bear or carry across).

  The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image.

  GEORGE ORWELL, 1946

  Our language is full of metaphors that rely on physical experiences. We can catalog how all kinds of bodily actions are used to describe more abstract, invisible concepts.

  TOUCH: One can be touched by a kind gesture.

  SMELL: One can think the plan stinks or smells fishy.

  TASTE: A tasteless movie could put you in a bitter or sour mood.

  HEARING: Wearing that loud outfit sounds crazy.

  SIGHT: Watch the political environment to see how it looks.

  One's interaction with one's body and one's environment constitutes the heart and soul of human thought. The concepts that one creates, as well as one's way of reasoning, are seen as emerging from such interactions. … people do not mentally juggle with patterns of unanchored, meaningless symbols. Rather, thought is anchored in two fashions (that is, the meanings of our concepts come from two sources). Firstly, thought is anchored in the past through analogies, and secondly it is anchored in the concrete world through the body, which has participated in so many experiences.

  HOFSTADTER AND SANDER, 2013

  By the time we begin school, we are already equipped with a library of metaphors. They arrive to us from biological evolution, culture, and our own personal experiences. Some associations are wired into us, like snakes are bad. Many people sense a fear of snakes even though most of us have never had a negative experience with one. Some concept associations, such as a fear of spiders or heights, were selected by evolution. They became part of our wiring because they are useful.

  Other metaphors are learned during childhood as we learn our first language. Of course, many of these common cultural metaphors are also reinforced by our individual experiences. For example, Mother's warmth is associated with her affection. The conflation of warmth and affection wired our language to produce statements such as “he warmed up to me after being cold all day.”

  How do physical experiences influence, not just how we talk about the world, but also how we picture the world? So much of reality is consumed visually and so how we understand the world is also quite visual. Just like language, our visual cognition is supported by categories. It has been shown that cultures with more named color categories perform better when detecting color differences. A person raised in a grassland culture that has dozens of concepts of green (think: lime, grass, forest), is better at distinguishing shades of green than someone raised in a culture with fewer words to describe green. When looking at a group of similar green tiles, they pick out the one tile with a slightly different hue more quickly. More color categories and more relationships between them create a richer understanding of color. The very idea of more colors changes how the mind sees the world.

  The abstract is understood in the context of the concrete, the metaphysical in the context of the physical, the emotional in the context of the biological. Through metaphor, body and mind are inextricably intertwined.

  JAMES GEARY, 2011

  Theory-laden: There is no such thing as “raw” experience. All our experience of the world comes through layers of conscious and unconscious phenomena.

  DAVID DEUTSCH, 2011

  Differences between our mental categories fascinate us. But these boundary cases do not dominate the way we see the world. Mostly, people share a common set of visual concepts, a common embodied perspective, because we all have human bodies.

  Today, the word visualization describes an external process that puts abstract data into forms we can see with our eyes. But it has not always described this activity. To visualize meant to form a mental image, like the imaginative visions you experience with your eyes closed. So, for a moment, close your eyes and visualize your favorite color.

  Our psychology also limits our perception, allowing us to recognize and memorize events only in terms of certain modalities of encoding. We perceive through our sensory organs, to be sure, but no less through our concepts; in other words, we perceive not just physiologically but also intellectually. There is thus an unbreakable link between perceiving and conceiving.

  HOFSTADTER AND SANDER, 2013

  What did you just experience? The mind's eye supplies mental images that we perceive without sensory input. A common example of this phenomenon is the vivid visualization that occurs as you read. We become more engaged in the storytelling of a novel if it excites us into actively picturing its world. By supplying the costumes, sets, and special effects with our own imagination, the reading becomes more real. If an author can convince us to co-imagine the story, then we will stay engaged until the last page is turned.

  Seeing is knowing: The Indo-European root weid (to see) became the Greek oida (to know), from which idea emerged.

  You have the power to close your eyes and visualize yourself anywhere. You can be home, safe, warm, comfortable, loved.

  ELIZABETH ANDREWS, 2018

  What exactly is the mind's eye? Our ability to voluntarily shape these mental images varies. Some visions are spontaneous, like the imagery of dreams. Others are controlled and methodical, like the visualization we conjure up when planning a trip. Like many skills, our ability to visualize with our mind's eye can be improved through attention and practice.

  Samāna is the moment-to-moment continuum of sense impressions and mental phenomena in Buddhist philosophy

  The mind's eye evokes the forehead's mystical third eye. The third eye represents the attainment of higher consciousness in Eastern spirituality. It represents the wisdom of seers who have gained sophisticated insights into life. Wise holy people are revered because they perceive the invisible patterns of life. The abstraction they see cannot be known from simple visual input alone. The third eye opens as the consciousness awakens to a higher-order understanding of reality.

  This “mental cinema“ is always at work in all of us—and always has been, even before the invention of the cinema—and it never stops projecting images to our inner sight.

  ITALO CALVINO, 1984

  The mind's eye is a phenomenon to cultivate in ourselves and a target to engage with in others. A successful data story activates the mind's eye of the reader. It prompts them to see even more than what is on the page, just as your mental imagery runs wild while reading a novel. It is our challenge to help others see more.

  Visual Encoding

  Rules help us make pictures from data values. The number line's left-to-right sequence is one rule. It tells us exactly where to place each number in linear space. Familiar conventions, like the number line, can be mixed with rules we invent to see particular data better. It is up to us to choose the rules for how we generate data-driven pictures.

  In the 1950s, Stanley S. Stevens revived the study of the relationships between the magnitude of a physical stimulus and the intensity or strength that people feel. The field of psychophysics is the branch of psychology that deals with the relationships between physical stimuli and mental phenomena.

  Like any design field, making pictures from data requires you to balance many trade-offs. This includes grappling with the weird ways people perceive the world. You see, there is not always an even linkage between the strength of a sensory stimulus and how we perceive it. A sound that is twice as loud will not be heard so. A cake that has double the sugar will not taste twice as sweet. We misinterpret the power of vibration, smell, temperature, muscle force, and many other physical phenomena. And yes, we misjudge what we see as well. The warped ways we perceive warn us to remai
n vigilant against lazy visual design. The message you intend to send is often not the message that is received. Encoding content into sensory packages, without concern for how their meaning will be decoded, is no way to communicate.

  The essence of a graphical display is that a set of numbers … are represented by an appropriate visual metaphor.…

  HOWARD WAINER, 1997

  To choose how data gets encoded in a visual form is to choose the rules for how meaning gets packed into a picture. Encoding is all about building things. It is the most powerful agency we have to help create order from the chaos of our data. But cheeky encoding is not the goal. It does not serve the reader to present a visual contraption that requires painstaking dissection. As data storytellers, successful encoding is not mere witty storage.

  The great criterion is the effect produced on the mind.

  WILLIAM PLAYFAIR, 1801

  Successful encoding yields successful decoding. Visual decoding is how readers interpret data pictures. If the audience decodes successfully, then the picture has transmitted successfully. The same perceptual skills and biases that help us understand and encode can point us to how the audience might later decode.

  Clever encoding does not always translate to visual decoding.

  WILLIAM CLEVELAND, 1985

  Regardless of individual differences in data literacy, we all share a common set of visual metaphors because we all see a similar spatial understanding of the world. Do not risk mistranslation by ignoring the spatial meanings people employ to understand graphic information. Successful encoding builds a bridge to the audience's shared graphicacy.

  Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.

  JOHN BERGER, 1972

  There is a candy shop full of ways we get to communicate meaning visually. For example, the concept of importance is naturally associated with size. Big things are important. Why might this be? We start off small. When you are a child, big people like your parents are important. Bigger people, the ones who were already grown up, are much more powerful. Sometimes big adults are even scary. Even longer ago, big animals, you must remember, used to eat us.

  Graphicacy is knowledge or skill in the use of graphical information.

  Big things, whether parent or predator or palm tree, are also important because, to our eye, big things are closer. Ultimately, big things occupy a larger portion of our visual fields. There, big things vie for more of our attention. Important big things stretch, conceptually, into our language (e.g., “I wish you would stop focusing on small matters and see the giant issue we have”). Embodied metaphors transcend language because all people have similar embodied experiences. Big things are important in Zulu, Hawaiian, Turkish, Malay, and Russian. When we make pictures of important things, we do not have to abstract all the way to language metaphors. Just draw important things bigger on the page.

  An appeal to the eye when proportion and magnitude are concerned, is the best and readiest method of conveying a distinct idea. … The advantages proposed by this mode of representation, are to facilitate the attainment of information, and aid the memory in retaining it: which two points form the principal business in what we call learning, or the acquisition of knowledge. Of all the senses, the eye gives the liveliest and most accurate idea of whatever is susceptible of being represented to it; and when proportion between different quantities is the object, then the eye has an incalculable superiority; as from the constant, and even involuntary habit of comparing the sizes of objects it has acquired the capacity of doing so, with an accuracy that is almost unequaled.

  WILLIAM PLAYFAIR, 1801

  Rectangles placed side-by-side can help us compare two numbers. The bigger number gets a taller rectangle. Once the two rectangles are next to one another, we automatically compare them. We all recognize the negative space between their heights. It is as if our two eyes see what is on the page, but our mind's eye notices what is missing. Strive to create effortless experiences that engage the viewer. Visualization works best when the audience, like the reader of a novel, visualizes with you.

  Big things are important is just one of many visual metaphors we use to understand the world. Similarity is conceptualized in terms of physical closeness: two ideas could be close, in the same ballpark, diverging, or light-years apart. Me-first language assigns positivity to abstract concepts using our body's physical orientation: upright, frontward, and active.

  We could go on listing correlations between the body's physical experience and how we perceive and talk about the world. But what we really need is a more direct appreciation for how this helps us read data. How do common visual metaphors guide readers to decode data stories?

  CHAPTER

  4

  COUNTING TIME

  There were several roads near by, but it did not take her long to find the one paved with yellow brick. Within a short time she was walking briskly toward the Emerald City, her silver shoes tinkling merrily on the hard, yellow roadbed.

  THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ

  L. FRANK BAUM, 1900

  Mathematics flow from a stack of metaphors. Near the base of this stack is the common experience of tallying objects. Counting is the first of many ways we think about, talk about, and visualize numbers. Numbers as assembly, numbers as distance, and the ways we experience time are all familiar, once you pause to notice them. We must raise the ways we perceive numbers to our attention, and onto our design palette. Then, we can use our knowledge of how everyone perceives numbers to anticipate, and better serve, our audience.

  Count Me In

  Children learn their numbers by counting objects. When we count, the things we actually see are represented by the idea of a single, specific number. Count four bricks, in any order, and the count remains the same, the idea of four persists. The set of numbers we use to count objects is the first step from concrete reality into the abstraction of mathematics. We can even apply the object-number metaphor to the concept of zero. Zero is the empty collection of no objects at all.

  Closure is an engine for creating new mathematics. Given any set of elements and a set of operations, we can ask whether that set is “closed” under those operations: Do those operations always yield members of that set? If not, we can ask what other elements need to be added to that set in order to achieve closure, if closure is even possible.

  But, what if you have the same four bricks and I ask for five? You will not be able to meet my request. The solution to 4 – 5 requires a negative number and a negative brick is absurd. Similarly, what if we want to divide our set of four bricks into three equal groups? The object-number metaphor cannot support all division. It has no solution for 4÷3. Perhaps we could smash the bricks into pieces and assemble three equal groups of pieces of bricks. But this is not the same as groups of bricks. The object-number metaphor fails again.

  Because, say, 5 – 5 is not a natural number, zero had to be added. Because, say 3 – 5 is not a natural number, negative numbers have to be added. Because, say, 3 ÷ 5 is not a natural number, rational numbers (fractions) had to be added. Because, say, √2 is not a rational number, irrational numbers had to be added to form the “real numbers.”

  LAKOFF AND NÚÑEZ, 2000

  The object-number metaphor is unable to support the fractions that division demands. We address this shortcoming with a second metaphor: Objects are assemblies. An assembled whole can be separated into smaller parts, like a toy plane made from many Lego bricks. The assembly-number metaphor allows numbers to be decomposed into smaller parts. This metaphor extends our conception of each object, each number. Assembly parts begin to open up the whole domain of arithmetic possibility.

  To measure the length of a room, you might walk heel-to-toe, from one side of the space to the other, counting the number of feet as you go. We measure length by counting how many times the same object can be placed end to end across a span. Our own bodies were early standards of measure. In addition to our feet, we used the width of the thumb
(an inch), the width of the hand (still used to measure the height of horses), and the length from fingertip to elbow (the cubit). Bodily measures were externalized and standardized as simple tools like the builder's ruler and tailor's tape. Measuring tools evolved to include many units of length and they were scored appropriately.

  In 1958 MIT fraternity brothers measured the length of the Mass. Ave. Bridge, which connects MIT to Boston, using a new unit of measure. One smoot was exactly equal to the height of the shortest freshman pledge, Oliver R. Smoot, whose 5’7” body was laid down repeatedly over the span of the bridge to determine that its length was 364.4 SMOOTS ± 1 EAR.

  Whatever standard is used to measure length, whether it is a body part or not, we envision a long chain of unit objects. This chain represents a line segment, a concept with magnitude but no width. The length-number metaphor builds on object and assembly metaphors. It adds many useful properties to our understanding of numbers and our ability to calculate with them. Length has an inherent organization. If you count the contents of a box of four rocks, the order in which you count does not matter. Line segments are not so forgiving. Four always comes after three along the line. The length-number metaphor provides a visual anchor and conceptual home for each value. We can now see the order of the numbers.