Visualizing Data: Focusing on an Approach

The very abundance of visualization techniques can make selecting the one most appropriate for bringing out the meaning in data a perplexing search a difficult, frustrating, and time-consuming aspect of visualization. If your thought process is like ours, you most likely rely first on experience. If nothing appropriate suggests itself, you may turn to other convenient sources: programs that colleagues are currently using or a new technique a friendly programmer offers. In each instance, you study the resulting image for any useful information it may reveal. This reflexive “try, then study” approach may eventually yield an image that reveals the meaning in the data, but it is just as likely to yield an image that is pretty but useless.