Chapter Nine
Images, Narrative, and Gestures for Explanation
Most of this book up to this point has been about how to display data for the data analyst. It has been about data exploration and how to present data so that new things can be discovered. But there is another major use of visualization, and that is the explanation of patterns in data. Once something has been understood by someone, that person must usually present those results to other people, with the goal of convincing them that one interpretation or another is correct. The cognitive processes involved (i.e., interpreting data and explaining data) are very different.
One way of elucidating this difference is to think about who or what is in control of the cognitive sequence. The ...
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