Looking Outwards 2
Self-Illustrating Phenomena
https://graphics.stanford.edu/~hanrahan/talks/selfillustrating/

I’m really interested in data visualization but I don’t often think about/explore it in the context of research in the physical sciences. Pat Hanrahan gave an interesting talk at Stanford about “Self-Illustrating Phenomena”, which he essentially use as a way to talk about the goal of visualizations in general (“At a high-level: to convey information and to support reasoning. At a practical level: To create visualizations that scientists, engineers, doctors, analysts and ordinary people use everyday to solve problems; to build systems that increase their productivity and hopefully make their job easier.”). A self-illustrating phenomena, from what I gather, is basically an image of the affect some phenomena has on a real environment. This could be anything from “Chladni Waves” (shown below), which physically visualize sound, or a cloud/bubble chamber engineered specifically to reveal characteristics of particles. Hanrahan notes that the latter picture “tells the whole story using a very sophisticated visual language created by the underlying physics and the experimental design of the bubble chamber.” I think this is a really important way of looking at visualization; you create an environment designed to pick up certain features of an object/system and translate these properties into visual form. Usually I think of this in terms of coming up with some data to scrape from somewhere on the internet, and then choosing how to visually represent that on a screen.