Comment by godelski
9 hours ago
Working in any science should also make this argument clearer. Data as text is hard to read and communicate. Even explanations of results. But graphs? Those are worth a thousand words. They communicate so much so fast. There's also a lot of skill to doing this accurately and well, just as one can say about writing. A whole subfield of computer graphics is dedicated to data visualization because it's so useful. Including things like colors. Things people often ignore because it feels so natural and obvious but actually isn't.
I think it's naïve to claim there's a singular best method to communicate. Text is great, especially since it is asynchronous. But even the OP works off of bad assumptions that are made about verbal language being natural and not being taught. But there's a simple fact, when near another person we strongly prefer to speak than write. And when we can mix modes we like to. There's an art to all this and I think wanting to have a singular mode is more a desire of simplicity than a desire to be optimal
It is true that graphs communicate very well. But they do come from text... And in the end we need to be able to describe what we see in them in text.
I think you're reaching. Justifying the answer you want rather than the answer that is.
No, graphs do not need come from text. I've frequently hand generated graphs as my means of recording experimental output. This is a common method when high precision is not needed (because your uncertainty level is the size of your markers). But that's true for graphs in general anyways.
Importantly, graphs are better at conveying the relationship between data, rather than information about a single point. (something something - Poincaré ;)
Besides, plots aren't the only types of graphs. Try network graphs.
Besides, graphs aren't the only visual communication of data.
I'll give you an even more obvious one: CAD. Sure, you can do that in text... but it takes much more room to do and magnitudes more time to interpret. So much so that everyone is going to retranslate it into a picture. Hell, I'll draw on paper before even pulling up the software and that's not uncommon.
> CAD. Sure, you can do that in text... but it takes much more room to do and magnitudes more time to interpret.
Fascinating example for me. I do CAD... using text! My only experience with it is programmatic in openscad. We check the visualization, but only on output of the final product. For me it's dramatically easier to work with. That may be a personal defect but it's also consistent. Underneath the rendering is always data, which is text, markup, but strings of fundamental data.
And in science it's not a stretch at all that numbers come first. I'll argue you're reaching. Today no one is drawing their numbers from experiments directly on a graph. They record them digitally. In textual form typically, and then render them visually to obtain generic understanding. But also there, in the end, your conclusions (per tradition) need to be point estimates with error bounds expressible in concise textual terms. You may obtain them from looking at images but the hard truth is numerical, digital, textual.
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No, you do not need to, and will not generally be able to, describe everything that a graph conveys in text. Graphs can give you an intuitive understanding of the data that text would not be able to, simply by virtue of using other parts of the brain and requiring less short term memory. If a graph can be replaced with 5 pages of text, that doesn't mean that you get the same information from both - you're likely much more able to keep one image in your short term memory than 5 pages of text.
But a graph, which provides a view at a certain level of resolution, can often be described in a few consise statements. That's why we make them, to get a view we can condense.
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A word is worth a thousand images. Wait...
But they are multiple different "views" into data, and I would posit that a textual view of data is no different than a graphical view, no? If you import data from a parquet file, you go straight from numbers to graphs, so I disagree that it comes from text. Both graphs and text come from information. Circles on surveys, Arduino temperature readings, counter clickers when doing surveys. Those are not just text.