The Many Names of Visualization

Nathan Yau recently wrote a posting about the different words used for visualization and infographics. His definitions are interesting because they reveal quite a bit about his background and main focus, and his blind spots give some insights into the community he's working in.

Definitions

Here are Nathan's definitions with my comments. Since I have something to say about almost all of them, I decided to quote his entire list. I don't claim that my view is better or more correct, I simply want to provide a second opinion.

data visualization — Graph-like image or interactive, usually tied with data exploration and analysis.

First definition, first major difference: a lot of people in the visualization field would consider data visualization to denote scientific visualization (i.e., volume or flow visualization of data with spatial dimensions), for whatever reason. There may be simple historical reasons for this, or the assumption that scientific visualization deals with more data.

In any case, data visualization has a particular slant, and is not the same as visualization in general, and certainly does not refer to charts or ‘interactives.'

Posted by Robert Kosara on October 2, 2011.

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Comments

Iain Dillingham says…

This really supports the idea that Nathan's choice of terms reflects his background -- there isn't anything on geographic visualization (or geovisualization, if you prefer). And from there, we could hop over to cartography.

I suspect the term "data visualization" will be used more and more in the more general sense, especially as the technology-savvy community and publishers like O'Reilly start to popularise "data science".

Robert Kosara says…

Good point, but geovisualization tends to be fairly clearly defined (i.e., that term is pretty unambiguous). A lot of the visualization theory comes from geovisualization (in particular Bertin), but in the current venues map-based visualizations are fairly rare.

Claire says…

Can't be sure, but guessing the "z" comes from phonetic pronunciation. /z/ is the voiced counterpart of /s/, and when s' precedent is either an unvoiced consonant or a vowel, it takes a /z/ sound. People probably subconsciously applied this rule first to the spoken pronounciation of infovis and then swapped the s for z in the spelling.