now

During the Tufte talk today I started thinking about self-generated visualizations ( thanks Nadeem for pointing out some of the examples and conversing on the subject with me ) . I know it’s not a new thing but in my head it’s a new visualization category. The more I think about it the more examples I find. Here are some of them:

This photograph of the earth at night is a visualization of concentrations of artificial light. Someone didn’t design a visualization from a set of data, instead they captured or documented a situation that conveys the information.

Or, as Golan Levin talks about it in his TED Talk, “This is a photograph of the desktop of a student of mine. And when I say desktop, I don’t just mean the actual desk where his mouse has worn away the surface of the desk. If you look carefully, you can even see a hint of the Apple menu, up here in the upper left, where the virtual world has literally punched through to the physical”. It’s another self generated visualization.

Or, Subway Lines by Meaghan Kombol visualizing the New York subway lines’ bumps and kinks. In her words “This is about the motion, within the locomotion of the New York City subway system. To document this, I attempted to draw a straight line, on a piece of paper, mid-journey, while riding each of the twenty-three of the New York City subway lines”. (From the book Speck by Peter Buchanan-Smith)