There are a few reasons why The Outliers needs to be here. And I want to be quite frank about this.
I’ll be posting five points (starting with most important) for the next week or two. (Also coming up is a post about Graphic Presentation once the book arrives!! woop!)
There needs to be an advocate for information aesthetic visualisation who will write to fight on their own territory.
How many seem to bat for the other team? Only a couple, but they’re pretty damn loud. There’s Visual Complexity and Eager Eyes on the one extreme, then there’s information-is-beautiful on the other, who doesn’t seem to be doing any favours for anyone by claiming that prettiness can trump if it’s cool, or that data integrity isn’t important and visually cheating is okay (I told you I would be frank).
On this team, the players seem to be concentrating on more important work than to succumb to verbal diarrhoea. infosthetics is more of an uncritical, don’t-step-on-anyone’s-toes collection of information aesthetics vis (although Andrew does get shitty leave annoyed comments every so often – and is probably kept busy by wonderful pedagogic pursuits). Then there’s Tom Carden who doesn’t have enough time to blog (who would, when you’re working for the wonderful stamen?), the Visual Lab at IBM, who spend too much time on great papers to even bother about blogging. And well-formed-data who no one should bother about anything when he’s making (wonderful) stuff like this (wah!)
All the hoo-ha usually happens on Their territory, never on Ours. Why? Well, because of all of the above.
That’s why I’m creating The Outliers.
*This is not an exclusive list. Obviously, there’s Flowing Data, whose stance I don’t know. There’s also Paley’s information esthetics, Anna Munster’s other information aesthetics, and the original Manovich Info-Aesthetics. There are also information graphics blogs and others…
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Why The Outliers Is Here #1: Fighting On Our Territory
There are a few reasons why The Outliers needs to be here. And I want to be quite frank about this.
I’ll be posting five points (starting with most important) for the next week or two. (Also coming up is a post about Graphic Presentation once the book arrives!! woop!)
There needs to be an advocate for information aesthetic visualisation who will write to fight on their own territory.
How many seem to bat for the other team? Only a couple, but they’re pretty damn loud. There’s Visual Complexity and Eager Eyes on the one extreme, then there’s information-is-beautiful on the other, who doesn’t seem to be doing any favours for anyone by claiming that prettiness can trump if it’s cool, or that data integrity isn’t important and visually cheating is okay (I told you I would be frank).
On this team, the players seem to be concentrating on more important work than to succumb to verbal diarrhoea. infosthetics is more of an uncritical, don’t-step-on-anyone’s-toes collection of information aesthetics vis (although Andrew does get shitty leave annoyed comments every so often – and is probably kept busy by wonderful pedagogic pursuits). Then there’s Tom Carden who doesn’t have enough time to blog (who would, when you’re working for the wonderful stamen?), the Visual Lab at IBM, who spend too much time on great papers to even bother about blogging. And well-formed-data who no one should bother about anything when he’s making (wonderful) stuff like this (wah!)
All the hoo-ha usually happens on Their territory, never on Ours. Why? Well, because of all of the above.
That’s why I’m creating The Outliers.
*This is not an exclusive list. Obviously, there’s Flowing Data, whose stance I don’t know. There’s also Paley’s information esthetics, Anna Munster’s other information aesthetics, and the original Manovich Info-Aesthetics. There are also information graphics blogs and others…