Abstraction & Accuracy - 10QViz

Do you need to show all the data, or is summary or abstraction OK? Join the ABSTRACTION & ACCURACY Conversation Perhaps the simplest example of this idea comes from medical illustration. A photograph of an organ shows every detail, but the “highlighting” in that photograph is literally determined by the lighting. The author of an anatomy textbook might instead want to “highlight” aspects of that organ that are important to a particular lesson, and thus might look to an illustrator to create a more abstract, less literal, representation for the purposes of explanation. More subtle examples of a need for abstraction come from the realm of what is now called “big data,” where there is too much information to be visualized at once. Solutions can involve statistical manipulations (e.g. showing averages and dispersions), or the use of abstract symbols to represent different regimes in or behavior of the data. Example: What will Astronomers see in spectra from a young star with an outflow? In 1980, astronomers noticed that the “spectral-line profiles” coming from gas near young stars had weird asymmetries (see Snell, Loren & Plambeck 1980 for the full story). The actual spectral observations are shown in the 4-panel graphic […]