On Safari in the File Format Jungle - Why Can't You Visualize My Data?

To the utmost disappointment of the interested party, this approach usually doesn’t work. The apparent expectation is that visualization is something like using a Web browser: here’s the URL, just click on it and out pops a pretty image. Reality, however, differs markedly from this vision. When people see a good visualization or movie of some data, they typically have no idea about the effort behind it. For example, I once showed a scientist a 30-second animation of his data, and he asked how long it took to create it. I said it was pretty quick— only three weeks. He was totally puzzled by that answer, and expressed his astonishment: “For 30 seconds? Why did it take you so long?” At the time, I was unprepared for this reaction and somewhat at a loss for words. Fortunately, in the meantime, I’ve heard rumors that at Industrial Light & Magic, a team of several hundred people worked for three months to create a three-second sequence for a Star Wars movie. So, now I have a better reply in similar situations: I point out that I’m still orders of magnitude faster than the George Lucas team. Of course, my result is not yet a Hollywood blockbuster. Figures 1 and 2 show examples of visualizations I created from “easy to read” data, including the famous “just ASCII” format. These images have become quite popular, but the amount of work involved in preparing the data for the final visualization process—which takes only a fraction of a second—is far from obvious in the final results.