20. Explanatory visualization
Data visualizations that are used to
transmit information or a point of
view from the designer to the
reader. Explanatory visualizations
typically have a specific “story” or
information that they are intended
to transmit.
Exploratory visualization
Data visualizations that are used by
the designer for self-informative
purposes to discover patterns,
trends, or sub-problems in a
dataset. Exploratory visualizations
typically don’t have an already-
known story.
Suppose we have a table of numerical data associated with placenames on something like Wikipedia. How do we knock up a quick map view of the data?
The top, blue strip shows the gear (1 to 7); the green strip shows the throttle pedal depression (0-100%), and the red strip shows the brake (0-100%). The light blue strip is a composite of the previous three strips. The whiter the pixel, the closer it is to 100% throttle in 7th gear with no braking.The bottom two traces show the longitudinal and lateral g-force respectively. For the longitudinal trace, red shows braking – being forced into the steering wheel; green shows acceleration – being forced back into your seat. You’ll see the greatest g-force under braking occurs when the brakes are slapped full on… (the red bits in the third and fifth traces line up). For the latitudinal g-force, the red shows the driving being flung to the left (i.e. right hand corner), the green shows them being pushed out to the right.