Pragmatism, Practicality, and the Anti-Sublime

Imagine an interactive JavaScript globe. It could take many forms. This one is built in D3, based off Mike Bostock’s excellent example and, like most interesting JavaScript visualization, runs smoothly in Chrome and Safari and poorly in Firefox (I haven’t tested it on IE9 and it won’t even show up on Ie8 or earlier):

The interactive globe, typified by Google Earth, is an interesting choice to represent geographic data visualization. For datasets that cover the entire world, geographers prefer a projected, flat world, because the globe only allows for representing half the world at once and heavily distorts the edges. Here, geographers are aligned with the limitations of the code, especially for globes that run in your browser without any plug-ins. The globe above is an orthographic projection, with a point of origin determined dynamically based on the movement of your mouse. The code is quite elegant, and understanding it was an extremely valuable lesson in understanding geographic projections–another little argument for algorithmic literacy. But all that math means I’m limited in the amount of additional data I can provide. That’s why data visualizations that leverage something like this are going to provide little more additional dynamic material. If I wanted to lose the spinning globe, and utilize a traditional flat world map, I’m provided with enough additional capacity to drop a thousand or so points on the same map, to be dynamically styled based on other factors.

The above is practically all the same code and the same data (for the polygonal area and the points), also in D3, and while they’re very small, there are about a thousand or so extra dots on that map which, if you’re using a modern browser, can be tied into whatever data-driven scholarly argument you’re providing.

And yet, there’s something appealing about a globe, whether virtual or real, and I think it has something to do with its perceived physicality and the same ludic, interactive appeal found in ORBIS. You can rotate a globe, and in doing so you’re doing a sort of primitive spatial query. It adjusts and responds, providing a natural fisheye effect. I think this behavior aligns with Warren Sack’s concept of the “sublime” in information aesthetics.

…many data visualization projects can properly be called “antisublime.” But, the neologism ‘anti-sublime’ is understandable as within the bounds of what scientists and engineers discuss as ‘user friendly,’ or, more simply, as ‘easy to understand.’ This characterization of artistic data visualization as an exercise in beautiful image making to render data ‘friendly’ or ‘easy’ is unsatisfactory for most artists and designers concerned with information visualization. It is tantamount to an understanding that the artistic work is only an attempt to ‘pretty things up,’ i.e., to make computer images easy to understand.

While Sack refers to data artists, I think the same applies to any attempt to expand the boundaries of what makes a “successful” data visualization beyond simple measurements of accessibility and uptake. It aligns, in my mind, with the sense that along with the creators of data visualizations having a responsibility to craft comprehensible objects, there needs to be a concomitant push for visual information literacy through an expectation that the reader has a responsibility to put in real effort to understand sophisticated concepts. But this is more an acknowledgement of the perils of the anti-sublime. I think there needs to also be an acknowledgement of the value of the sublime from a pragmatic perspective, acknowledging that some of the traits we consider “fun” or “pretty” are actually valuable and can make it worth eschewing conventional, practical, utilitarian measures of successful presentation of data.

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