Micro Vi­su­al­i­sa­tions

What is com­mu­ni­ca­tion?

When one tries to de­fine what com­mu­ni­ca­tion re­ally is, he quickly comes to the con­clu­sion that every­thing we do is com­mu­ni­ca­tion. »Ac­tiv­ity or in­ac­tiv­ity, words or si­lence all have mes­sage value: they in­flu­ence oth­ers […].« (Wat­zlaw­ick et al., 1967) As de­sign­ers, we shape many as­pects of this wide field and help other peo­ple to com­mu­ni­cate the way they wish to. Viewed with an even broader de­f­i­n­i­tion of de­sign, hu­mankind as de­signer has de­vel­oped a wide va­ri­ety of com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels, rang­ing from body lan­guage and spo­ken lan­guage over to writ­ten and printed type, and fi­nally to elec­tron­i­cally processed com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Each of these steps marked a mile­stone in mankind’s his­tory, but none could com­pletely re­place pre­vi­ous medi­ums. Even though some of the utilised tech­nol­ogy for each com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nel might have been re­placed over time, the basic con­cept of com­mu­ni­ca­tion stayed pre­served.

There are two rea­sons for that: First, every form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion has its own qual­i­ties, ad­van­tages, and ap­pli­ca­tions at dif­fer­ent set­tings, and sec­ond, each de­vel­op­ment rests upon the for­mer one and there­fore re­lies on the com­mon un­der­stand­ing of the pre­vi­ous one.

To em­pha­sise this re­la­tion even fur­ther, Paul Wat­zlaw­ick’s fa­mous quote »One can­not not com­mu­ni­cate« (Wat­zlaw­ick et al., 1967) ex­pands the de­f­i­n­i­tion of what com­mu­ni­ca­tion is. He ar­gues that there is no op­po­site of to com­mu­ni­cate and thus makes »com­mu­ni­ca­tion syn­ony­mous, or nearly syn­ony­mous, with be­hav­iour.« (Mot­ley, 1990) This im­pli­cates that at least one of the com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels avail­able to human is al­ways ac­tive. It also fa­cil­i­tates the the­ory of multi-lay­ered com­mu­ni­ca­tion and thus that a sin­gle form of ex­pres­sion is sel­dom and a sin­gle form of im­pres­sion is im­pos­si­ble. The fol­low­ing ex­am­ple il­lus­trates this: When one reads a text, one is not just read­ing. He is also see­ing how the text is pre­sented. The writ­ten, printed or dis­played words are only one part of the in­for­ma­tion that is re­ceived. The ma­te­r­ial, the lay­out and the many as­pects of ty­pog­ra­phy all com­mu­ni­cate on their own and thus in­flu­ence how and what in­for­ma­tion is per­ceived from the ac­tual text. Mar­ket­ing knows that and de­fines CIs con­sist­ing of cor­po­rate de­sign, lan­guage, sound, smell, and many more as­pects that all strengthen the strin­gent brand­ing of the com­pany.

What can be taken from this is the broad un­der­stand­ing of what com­mu­ni­ca­tion is. To use this meth­ods not to make money but to im­part knowl­edge to oth­ers through a wide va­ri­ety of means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

What is Ty­pog­ra­phy?

The im­por­tance of the ap­pear­ance of the text is well known and gen­er­a­tions of type de­sign­ers and ty­pog­ra­phers de­vel­oped a va­ri­ety of tech­niques to de­sign and en­hance the »text-see­ing« and read­ing process. It is »the art, or skill, of de­sign­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion by means of the printed word« (Childers et al., 2002) But even be­fore books were printed, a highly elab­o­rated dis­ci­pline had formed around type de­sign. (Drucker, 2014) Today ty­pog­ra­phy is an in­her­ent and es­sen­tial part in de­sign ed­u­ca­tion. The va­ri­ety of type de­sign prin­ci­ples and ty­po­graphic vari­ables need to be thought­fully ap­plied to the text to com­ply with the con­tent but also to be un­der­stood by the reader. Some of these prin­ci­ples are con­ven­tions, which evolved over time (italic and reg­u­lar fonts), oth­ers are based on fun­da­men­tal de­ci­sions such as read­ing from one side in one di­rec­tion (jus­ti­fied, flush left, or cen­tered text), while oth­ers base on per­cep­tional rea­son­ing (font size and weight).

Car­ried by this unique craft, writ­ten and later – with Guten­berg’s in­ven­tion – printed books came to their promi­nent sta­tus they hold today. But the im­por­tance of ty­pog­ra­phy is not jus­ti­fied by the dec­o­ra­tion of the text, but rather the read­abil­ity of the text and more fun­da­men­tally by the sup­port­ive char­ac­ter the de­sign plays for the con­tent of the text. Robert Bringhurst ex­em­pli­fies this for the type­face: »When the type is poorly cho­sen, what the words say lin­guis­ti­cally and what the let­ters imply vi­su­ally are dishar­mo­nious, dis­hon­est, out of tune.« (Bringhurst, 2012) To clar­ify, ho­n­our or dis­guise the con­tent is seen as the most im­por­tant role ty­pog­ra­phy plays. But with the lever­age its ap­pli­ca­tion has, it can also be mis­used: »In a world rife with un­so­licited mes­sages, ty­pog­ra­phy must often draw at­ten­tion to it­self be­fore it will be read.« (Bringhurst, 2012) This im­plies the con­se­quences that ty­po­graphic de­ci­sions have on the vi­sual ap­pear­ance and hence on the very first im­pres­sion the reader has of the text. With other words: »Type is per­sua­sive – and thus so is ty­pog­ra­phy […]« (Santa Maria, 2014)

Be­sides the used ma­te­r­ial, the se­lec­tion of an ap­pro­pri­ate type­face is the first and most fun­da­men­tal de­ci­sion when ap­proach­ing a text. With the se­lec­tion of one type­face the de­signer takes over many de­ci­sions that were pre­vi­ously made by the type de­signer. It may also de­mand a cer­tain ty­po­graphic ap­pli­ca­tion to suit its ap­pear­ance. The ex­pla­na­tion of the com­plete process of let­ter and type de­sign would go be­yond the scope of this study, but what is rel­e­vant for this the­sis is the great im­pact the se­lec­tion of a type­face has for the per­cep­tion of the text. Stronger than any other ty­po­graphic de­ci­sion, the type­face af­fects many as­pects of the read­ing ex­pe­ri­ence. First the read­abil­ity con­sist­ing of reader-friend­li­ness (Le­se­freund­lich­keit), dis­tin­guisha­bil­ity (Un­ter­scheid­bar­keit), rec­og­niz­abil­ity (Er­kenn­bar­keit), and leg­i­bil­ity (Le­ser­lich­keit) (Her­rmann, 2010) and sec­ondly — even more promi­nent — the con­no­ta­tions that come with the type­face. From a con­sumer psy­chol­ogy view »type­faces con­vey mean­ings that have the po­ten­tial to sig­nif­i­cantly in­flu­ence im­por­tant mar­ket­ing con­structs. These as­so­ci­a­tions in­flu­ence how con­sumers per­ceive brands, as well as, what they re­mem­ber about brands.« (Childers & Jass, 2002) Taken the book as a prod­uct that rep­re­sents the text, it be­comes clear that we per­ceive and re­mem­ber the con­tent dif­fer­ently de­pend­ing on the cho­sen type­face.

With this most ob­vi­ous de­ci­sion in ty­pog­ra­phy as in­tro­duc­tion, fur­ther »tools« that are avail­able for ty­pog­ra­phers are for ex­am­ple mar­gin, line-height, let­ter-spac­ing or let­ter case. A full ex­plo­ration of these vari­ables is dis­cussed in re­la­tion to »vi­su­al­i­sa­tion« fur­ther down.

What is Vi­su­al­i­sa­tion?

The power of pho­tographs has been used for a long time. The al­leged ob­jec­tiv­ity in­duces pub­lish­ers to show »the sin­gle truth«. The pre­tended ev­i­dence of the image re­duces com­plex mat­ters to sin­gle state­ments. (Bolz, 2012) As men­tioned above, nearly every news­pa­per nowa­days re­lies on the im­pact a pho­to­graph can have for a story. But with this prac­tice prob­lems arise con­cern­ing the pho­tographa­bil­ity of cer­tain sub­jects. (Bolz, 2012) In­tan­gi­ble and ab­stract prob­lems can­not draw much at­ten­tion to it­self, be­cause they can­not be cap­tured in a pho­to­graph or an il­lus­tra­tion. This be­comes even more ap­par­ent in the con­text of so­cial media, where posts with im­ages reach higher click rates. Ar­ti­cles that do not show their con­tent with at­trac­tive im­ages can­not arise much at­ten­tion. One an­swer to these un­de­pictable sub­jects are vi­su­al­i­sa­tions, which en­code ab­stract data into tan­gi­ble graph­ics. Pre­vi­ously »in­vis­i­ble« and highly com­plex processes gain shape through ab­stract graph­i­cal el­e­ments. Thus vi­su­al­i­sa­tions are used for in­for­ma­tion ex­pla­na­tion.

Vi­su­al­i­sa­tion is not a new field, but ex­pe­ri­enced an up­turn in re­cent time. With ab­stract data be­com­ing ubiq­ui­tous the chal­lenge to make sense of this new re­source be­came ap­par­ent in all in­dus­tries. The term big data arised in the hope to find pre­vi­ously hid­den in­sights from the analy­sis of great amounts of data. Be­sides clas­si­cal sta­tis­ti­cal meth­ods, vi­su­al­i­sa­tion is an­other promis­ing and proven ap­proach. For this pur­pose data vi­su­al­i­sa­tions are used for ex­plo­ration. The sta­tis­ti­cian John Tukey al­ready pre­dicted 1965 »a greater and greater role for graph­i­cal tech­niques as aids to ex­plo­ration and in­ci­sive­ness« for his sub­ject. (Tukey, 1965)

While the tex­tual analy­sis of such an amount of data is not ef­fi­cient, hu­mans are very good at spot­ting pat­tern, ab­nor­mal­i­ties or trends on a vi­sual level. (Few, 2014) Ware goes even fur­ther and says »There is no other way of pre­sent­ing in­for­ma­tion so that struc­tures, groups, and trends can be dis­cov­ered among hun­dreds of data val­ues«. (Ware, 2004)

Nor­bert Bolz speaks in this con­text about the con­ci­sion (Prä­gnanz) of an image. This qual­ity en­ables us to in­stantly see the con­tent. (Bolz, 2012) In order to un­der­stand this process, the human sen­sory sys­tem needs to be ex­am­ined. »The term sen­sory sys­tem in­cludes all phe­nom­ena that man­i­fest them­selves in the con­scious­ness as re­sult of stim­u­la­tion of any sen­sory organ«. (Haverkamp, 2009) This rather broad de­f­i­n­i­tion de­scribes (all) the phe­nom­ena as some­thing which is ac­tively man­i­fest­ing it­self. This seems to be op­posed to the widely es­tab­lished and ac­cepted con­cept of con­struc­tivism, which de­scribes how we per­ceive our sur­round­ings on the basis of a the­o­ret­i­cal model. In phi­los­o­phy, an­thro­pol­ogy and psy­chol­ogy — in con­trast to con­struc­tivism in art — it de­scribes the fol­low­ing process: When we ob­serve ob­jects, we re­con­struct these as men­tal ob­jects. These ideas are con­stantly matched to pre­vi­ous ex­pe­ri­ences and in­flu­ences. These »im­ages« of ob­jects work as pro­to­types and can be re­called even with dif­fer­ent ap­pear­ance or after per­spec­tive trans­for­ma­tion. (Ware, 2004) This im­plies that the human brain is no longer pas­sive in its per­cep­tion, but in­stead ac­tive in terms of se­lec­tion, pro­jec­tion, in­ter­pre­ta­tion and sense-giv­ing: it con­structs its world in­di­vid­u­ally. (Malet­zke, 1998)

This ob­vi­ously raises ques­tions re­gard­ing the »real re­al­ity«, which is a rather philo­soph­i­cal dis­cus­sion that goes be­yond the scope of this work. For de­sign­ers, this model is in­ter­est­ing in re­gard of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Con­cepts of mass com­mu­ni­ca­tions are no longer con­sis­tent with this the­ory. Every human needs to be viewed as an in­di­vid­ual, from whom con­sis­tent re­ac­tions can no longer be ex­pected. What is rel­e­vant for the pur­pose of this work and for the per­cep­tion of vi­su­al­i­sa­tion is the ac­tive se­lec­tion and in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the pre­sented image. De­spite this, the pas­sive per­cep­tion of vi­sual in­for­ma­tion is equally im­por­tant and has been sci­en­tif­i­cally proven as well. The an­swer to this seem­ing con­tra­dic­tion lays in the way our vi­sual sen­sory sys­tem works. Sim­pli­fied it con­sists of three con­sec­u­tive stages:

The last two stages in­volve ac­tive search, se­lec­tion and in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the given vi­sual in­for­ma­tion where it is im­por­tant to note that this »ac­tive« process is still processed mainly un­con­sciously. »Con­sider the eye­ball as an in­for­ma­tion-gath­er­ing search­light, sweep­ing the vi­sual world under the guid­ance of the cog­ni­tive cen­ters that con­trol our at­ten­tion. In­for­ma­tion is ac­quired in bursts, a snap­shot for each fix­a­tion. From an image buffer, the mas­sively par­al­lel ma­chin­ery of early vi­sual pro­cess­ing finds ob­jects based on salient fea­tures of im­ages.« (Ware, 2004)

In order to help spot­ting salient fea­tures, in­for­ma­tion de­signer should en­code this in­for­ma­tion to »pop out«. Var­i­ous stud­ies analysed which en­cod­ing works best for which type of data. The first and most cited tax­on­omy of such kind was for­mu­lated by Jacques Bertin. In his book Semi­ol­ogy of Graph­ics (Bertin, Semi­olo­gie Graphique, 1983), the car­tog­ra­pher con­strains his stud­ies with some fac­tors like print­able, stan­dard sized graph­ics on white paper. His work was later picked up by many sci­en­tists and ex­panded by un­no­ticed vari­ables and the ones that were left out in­ten­tion­ally by Bertin, as he is rooted in car­tog­ra­phy.

Bertin dis­tin­guishes seven forms of en­cod­ing. He de­scribes these as »vi­sual prim­i­tives« or as they are now com­monly called »vi­sual vari­ables«, from which the de­signer can form the image to sug­gest per­spec­tive, re­al­ity, re­la­tion­ships or space. (Ware, 2004) These vari­ables are: po­si­tion, size, value (tran­si­tion from light to dark), tex­ture, colour hue, ori­en­ta­tion and shape. I pro­pose the fol­low­ing mod­i­fi­ca­tions for a bet­ter struc­ture:

• sub­or­di­na­tion of colour hue, value, and tex­ture under ap­pear­ance and
• re­place­ment of value with opac­ity, since the tran­si­tion from light to dark can be treated as change of colour.

This re­sults in the fol­low­ing tax­on­omy:

Bertin’s vi­sual vari­ables have often been ex­tended, for ex­am­ple by MacEachren (2004) by crisp­ness, res­o­lu­tion, and trans­parency. Chen and Floridi (2012) ex­tended the list to 30 vari­ables and sub­or­di­nated them into four cat­e­gories: Geo­met­ric, op­ti­cal, topo­log­i­cal and re­la­tional, and se­man­tic chan­nel. While this fur­ther de­f­i­n­i­tion is help­ful it loses the idea of basic vi­sual en­cod­ings.

De­bat­ably all vari­ables from the »Topo­log­i­cal and Re­la­tional Chan­nel« are rather re­sults of the spa­cial po­si­tion­ing and the vari­ables re­gard­ing the mo­tion are also Bertin’s vi­sual prim­i­tives com­bined with time. The con­cept of vi­sual vari­ables needs a sec­ond layer that cov­ers such ad­vanced cases and fill in the gap to the psy­cho­log­i­cal Gestalt prin­ci­ples. While such an ap­proach seems to be promis­ing, it would go be­yond the scope of the­sis. Since Bertin’s ap­proach still has a broader ac­cep­tance I will stick to the pre­vi­ously ex­plained mod­i­fied ver­sion of his tax­on­omy for this the­sis.

Geo­met­ric Chan­nels:

• Size / length / width / depth
• Ori­en­ta­tion
• Shape
• Cur­va­ture
• Smooth­ness

Op­ti­cal Chan­nels:

• In­ten­sity / bright­ness
• Colour / hue / sat­u­ra­tion
• Opac­ity / trans­parency
• Tex­ture (partly geo­met­ric)
• Line styles (partly geo­met­ric)
• Shape / blur
• Shad­ing and light­ing ef­fects
• Shadow
• Depth (im­plicit / ex­plicit cues)

One help­ful as­pect of these vi­sual vari­ables is the rank­ing in re­gard to their ef­fec­tive­ness. This can be viewed from dif­fer­ent an­gles. First is the abil­ity to pop-out. Vi­su­al­i­sa­tion can help el­e­ments to stand out from the rest, mak­ing it eas­ier to spot when search­ing for a cer­tain one. Stud­ies (Borgo et. al, 2013) re­veal this order:

The sec­ond abil­ity of vi­sual vari­ables can be mea­sured by human’s per­cep­tion to most eas­ily de­code the in­for­ma­tion »be­hind« the en­coded data point. It is the vari­ables’ abil­ity to be def­i­nite. And also the ef­fort­less­ness of com­par­i­son be­tween mul­ti­ple points varies be­tween the chan­nels. This as­pect was also con­sid­ered by Bertin: For in­stance, the po­si­tion of an ob­ject along the x- and y-axis (the po­si­tion­ing in 3D spaces is being dis­cussed in the vi­su­al­i­sa­tion com­mu­nity con­tro­ver­sial) was de­scribed as the most pow­er­ful for ex­trac­tion and com­par­i­son. This idea of ef­fec­tive­ness was then con­tin­ued by Jock D. Mackin­lay. He pro­vided the sort­ing in re­la­tion to the given data type. Ac­cord­ing to S. S. Stevens, these data types are »nom­i­nal, or­di­nal, in­ter­val and ratio«. (Stevens, 1946) Even though his de­f­i­n­i­tion can be crit­i­cised, his work set a stan­dard in sta­tis­tics. For a clearer sep­a­ra­tion I will dis­tin­guish »in­ter­val« and »ratio« under »quan­ti­ta­tive« data types.

Ty­pog­ra­phy as Vi­su­al­i­sa­tion?

»Let­ters were mainly re­garded as a medium of com­mu­ni­ca­tion; it is es­sen­tial to recog­nise them as media of per­cep­tion.«

 — Sybille Krämer, 2003

Writ­ing as medium are fated in the same way every medium is con­sid­ered: Aris­to­tle al­ready de­scribed that media of per­cep­tion are in­deed ma­te­ri­al­is­tic but at the same time need to be trans­par­ent. (Krämer, 2003) Fritz Hei­der con­tin­ues this con­cept as he states that media make some­thing vis­i­ble which is not »of the ’na­ture‘ of the medium it­self«. Media »ais­theti­sis« by »un-ais­thetis­ing« them­selves (»Me­di­en aisthe­ti­sie­ren, indem sie sich selbst an-aisthe­ti­sie­ren«). (Hei­der in Krämer, 2006) The media philoso­pher Sybille Krämer ex­am­ines this re­la­tion be­tween vis­i­bil­ity and in­vis­i­bil­ity. In her ten the­ses about »no­ta­tional iconic­ity« (Schrift­bild­lich­keit) she pos­tu­lates the pre­sen­ta­tive in­stead of the rep­re­sen­ta­tive per­spec­tive on let­ters. (Krämer, 2003)

The blur­ring of bound­aries be­tween pre­sen­ta­tion and means of pre­sen­ta­tion is also sub­ject to the con­crete po­etry. Mostly through ty­po­graph­i­cal arrange­ment of words »poems of fig­ures« emerge. (Bauer et al., 2010) These fig­ures raise ques­tions on the sim­i­lar­ity of the mean­ing and the op­ti­cal ap­pear­ance of the words. The dis­tinc­tion be­tween fig­ure and text can no longer be ap­plied to this art form. In Eugen Gom­ringer’s poem the word »schwei­gen« (to be silent) has no sim­i­lar­ity to the idea it rep­re­sents, but il­lus­trates its mean­ing through the arrange­ment.

In a sim­i­lar way, my the­sis high­lights ty­pog­ra­phy as a mean of com­mu­ni­ca­tion for the text’s con­tent and not only to serve as a tool for read­abil­ity. To il­lus­trate this prob­lem in ap­pli­ca­tion: Jour­nal­ists pub­lish their ar­ti­cles in a news­pa­per. How­ever, the ty­po­graphic de­ci­sions were made long be­fore the ar­ti­cle was writ­ten by some­one un­in­volved in this par­tic­u­lar or in every other ar­ti­cle. The ap­pear­ance of the text rep­re­sents the news­pa­per, but not the text. Reg­u­la­tions on the font, the columns, use of em­phases or lay­out may not be ben­e­fi­cial for the text.

In order to ex­am­ine ty­pog­ra­phy for vi­su­al­is­ing in­for­ma­tion, I dis­cuss ty­pog­ra­phy from a data vi­su­al­i­sa­tion’s per­spec­tive. The de­scrip­tion of vi­sual at­trib­utes like the ones by Bertin, Cleve­land, Ware or Meirelles sum­marise ty­pog­ra­phy as one vi­sual vari­able. My hy­poth­e­sis is that ty­pog­ra­phy is not a sub­cat­e­gory like »size«, but rather a com­plete new »ob­ject« that can be mod­i­fied with the vi­sual vari­ables de­scribed by Bertin and oth­ers. When com­par­ing the vi­sual prim­i­tives with basic tech­niques used in ty­pog­ra­phy, one can see that these match in most cases con­cern­ing their im­ple­men­ta­tion and ef­fect. For ex­am­ple, a word can – just like a square – be scaled in size or changed in its po­si­tion. But some major points need to be con­sid­ered:

• In ty­pog­ra­phy there are even more vi­sual vari­ables avail­able due to con­ven­tions like un­der­lin­ing or line-height.
• It de­pends on whether it is ap­plied to the whole para­graph, the sen­tence, the word, or only the let­ter.
• Some of the »ty­po­graphic vari­ables« can­not be used with­out com­pro­mises on the leg­i­bil­ity. In con­trast, a rec­tan­gle in a reg­u­lar vi­su­al­i­sa­tion may suf­fer in vis­i­bil­ity but not in leg­i­bil­ity.
• In fact this is a com­plete new re­la­tion­ship be­tween en­tity and label. Nor­mally the en­tity is mod­i­fied, while the label stays un­af­fected. In my ap­proach the label is also the en­tity and thus re­quires care­ful mod­i­fi­ca­tion.
• Also, the ini­tial sit­u­a­tion is dif­fer­ent since in reg­u­lar vi­su­al­i­sa­tions each ob­ject rep­re­sents one (or mul­ti­ple ag­gre­gated) data point. There are no ob­jects on the plane that look like data points, but hold no data. When ap­ply­ing vi­su­al­i­sa­tion to only some words or text el­e­ments, the other words re­main in their orig­i­nal form and can act as »nor­mal« for com­par­i­son.
• The mod­i­fi­ca­tion of any of the ty­po­graphic vari­ables in­flu­ences the grey value (the per­ceived black­ness from a dis­tance) of the text. Some­times, this is not in­tended. The change of the type­face for in­stance might hence not only have a se­man­tic al­ter­ation but also a vi­sual ef­fect.

The table il­lus­trates the ty­po­graphic in­stru­ments for each form of en­cod­ing.

Shape

• Type­face
• Case / Style
• Weight
• Width
  
  

Size

• Scale

Shape

The shape of the let­ters can­not be mapped di­rectly to a sin­gle ty­po­graph­i­cal vari­able. There are mul­ti­ple op­tions to vary the font’s shape. The most rad­i­cal would be the ac­tual type­face. This cat­e­gor­i­cal al­ter­na­tion should be treated with cau­tion. Two major con­cerns need to be taken into ac­count:

• The dis­tinc­tion of dif­fer­ent type­faces can be hard for the lay­men. Serif, sans-serif, script, black­let­ter and dec­o­ra­tive fonts might eas­ily be dis­tin­guished, but within these cat­e­gories non-spe­cial­ists could hardly sep­a­rate Re­nais­sance, Baroque or Neo­clas­si­cal.
• An­other thing to be con­cerned of is the in­her­ent cul­tural as­so­ci­a­tion of that font. Black­let­ter fonts are com­monly (and falsely) as­so­ci­ated with the Third Reich, serif fonts with the an­tique and script fonts with a hu­manly touch. As these as­so­ci­a­tions are mainly per­sonal and in­di­vid­ual im­pres­sions in­stead of facts, one should be care­ful when ex­pect­ing the reader to link the con­trasty, ver­ti­cal ori­en­ta­tion to an 18th cen­tury mod­ern Ro­man­ism.

An­other way to al­ter­nate the shape of a font is ei­ther its case (low­er­case or up­per­case) or its style: italic (and rarely left oblique), small caps and roman. This has been com­mon prac­tice since the six­teenth cen­tury (Bringhurst, 2012). This fea­ture can only be used cat­e­gor­i­cally since there is com­monly no op­tion of more or less italic, for ex­am­ple.

The third op­tion is to use dif­fer­ent font-weights. De­pend­ing on the amount of fonts the type­face con­sists of, the font weight is a fea­si­ble vari­able to vi­su­alise in­for­ma­tion. The weight of the font also in­flu­ences the grey value of the text ac­cord­ingly and is there­fore – just like the colour value – able to com­mu­ni­cate its value from first sight and from a greater dis­tance by »pop­ping-out«. In con­trast to the shapes from reg­u­lar vi­su­al­i­sa­tion, dif­fer­ent font weight do have an order. The ex­am­ples given by Bertin (rec­tan­gle, star, tri­an­gle, …) an not be or­dered.

An­other op­tion is the width of the fonts. Some type­faces con­sist of extra fonts like con­densed, nar­row/com­pressed or ex­tended ones. These fonts could be equally used as dif­fer­ent weights, but since they are rather sel­dom (es­pe­cially for an­ti­qua type­faces), real world ap­pli­ca­tions would be rare. Fonts should not be streched out pro­gram­mat­i­cally in order to pre­serve their aes­thetic. This is also why the width is not con­sid­ered as size, but as shape.

One great pos­si­bil­ity would be Mul­ti­ple Mas­ter Fonts. These fonts can con­tin­u­ously in­ter­po­late be­tween two »mas­ters«. Pos­si­ble axes can be weight, width, op­ti­cal size and even style. With this tech­nique in­di­vid­ual in­ter­stages can be gen­er­ated. Un­for­tu­nately, MM fonts could not es­tab­lish it­self and are hence not sup­ported on cur­rent sys­tems. Re­cent de­vel­op­ments on this topic are JavaScript-based so­lu­tions such as Plumin.js, which al­lows to gen­er­ate/ma­nip­u­late fonts with JavaScript code. Pro­to­typo is an­other ap­proach that al­lows font ma­nip­u­la­tion with type de­signer vari­ables like x-height, cap­i­tal height, as­cen­der and de­scen­der height, slant, over­shoot, cross­bar po­si­tion, and width. Open­type.js even al­lows to di­rectly ma­nip­u­late an­chor points. All these tools could po­ten­tially be used for vi­su­al­i­sa­tion with con­tin­u­ous in­ter­states to rep­re­sent val­ues when they are fur­ther de­vel­oped for this kind of ap­pli­ca­tion. The dis­ad­van­tage of all of these tools is the purely math­e­mat­i­cal gen­er­a­tion of the fonts. The per­cep­tion of let­ters and thus their de­sign is not lin­ear. This often leads to un­pleas­ant re­sults. Ei­ther the gen­er­a­tion of fonts be­comes more ad­vanced and takes the non-lin­ear­ity into ac­count or the pos­si­ble un­aes­thetic and il­leg­i­ble ap­pear­ance needs to be ac­cepted. Fur­ther de­vel­op­ment will show if these JavaScript-based tools can man­age what the orig­i­nal Mul­ti­ple Mas­ter tools could not.

Po­si­tion

The po­si­tion of a let­ter can be al­tered in var­i­ous ways. On the x-axis the de­signer can change the kern­ing/spac­ing (the space be­tween let­ters), the in­den­tion/mar­gin (the space – usu­ally – from the left-hand side) and the gen­eral align­ment. On the y-axis the user can change the let­ters to su­pe­rior/in­fe­rior or the gen­eral line-spac­ing.

In re­gard to sin­gle let­ters the spac­ing is a good op­tion to com­mu­ni­cate both qual­i­ta­tive as well as quan­ti­ta­tive val­ues. De­spite the fact that exact de­cod­ing of the data is not pos­si­ble, this tech­nique al­lows for con­tin­u­ous data map­ping. An­other ad­van­tage of this method is also in­de­pen­dency from the type­face: The spac­ing is ap­plic­a­ble to every font. Ob­vi­ously ex­treme val­ues can cause il­leg­i­bil­ity or the drift­ing apart of let­ters. Shift­ing sin­gle let­ters in their y-po­si­tion is al­ready com­mon ty­po­graphic prac­tise. For ex­am­ple, chem­i­cal, phys­i­cal or math­e­mat­i­cal no­ta­tions use a shift for _sub- and ^superscript to cre­ate a hi­er­ar­chy be­tween char­ac­ters. What is im­por­tant to note here is that be­cause of the lit­tle pos­si­bil­i­ties of vari­a­tion within the line height, the vi­su­al­i­sa­tion be­comes cat­e­gor­i­cal or dis­crete rather than con­tin­u­ous. In some cases the reader can only des­ig­nate bot­tom, mid­dle or top po­si­tion in­stead of exact dif­fer­ences. The com­par­i­son is also dif­fi­cult across mul­ti­ple lines. As Cairo (2013) de­scribes, ob­jects with a com­mon base­line are eas­ier to col­late. This also lim­its the mod­i­fied amount of char­ac­ters to keep the base­line within a line row. An­other prob­lem that could cause a lack of com­par­i­son on the y-axis is the dif­fer­ent size of the let­ters. The as­cen­ders and de­scen­ders sug­gest dif­fer­ent start­ing points. It is there­fore rec­om­mended to use cap­i­tal let­ters to work with the same let­ter height.

In gen­eral, the repo­si­tion­ing can cause is­sues on the read­abil­ity. Each let­ter, word, sen­tence and para­graph has an in­her­ent po­si­tion that is cru­cial for the con­tent. The vari­ance of the po­si­tion is there­fore lim­ited and needs to be ap­plied care­fully. Let­ters and words are es­pe­cially bound to their po­si­tion.

The shift on the x-axis of sen­tences or para­graphs is al­ready used. Lists in a table of con­tents for ex­am­ple use dif­fer­ent po­si­tions to in­di­cate its hi­er­ar­chy. Again, a mod­est ex­e­cu­tion should be ap­plied to dis­play both cat­e­gor­i­cal or quan­ti­ta­tive data. One ad­van­tage of the con­tin­u­ous map­ping is that peo­ple can in­stantly un­der­stand the tech­nique.

An unique vari­able is the text align­ment like flush left, jus­ti­fied or cen­tered text. Spread­sheet soft­ware take ad­van­tage of this by align­ing text on the left side, while num­bers are aligned on the right side of the cell. Here, the cul­tural con­ven­tions need to be con­sid­ered.

Ap­pear­ance

As pre­vi­ously men­tioned, colour has the strongest pop-out ef­fect. In the com­monly black and white sur­round­ings of nor­mal text, el­e­ments stressed with colour draw even more at­ten­tion to them­selves. On one side this can be used for ad­van­tage by using it to em­pha­sise cer­tain val­ues, but on the other side it can also dis­tract users from read­ing. Be­cause colour can com­mu­ni­cate in­for­ma­tion from a greater dis­tance, it is often used in com­bi­na­tion with text for way find­ing sys­tems. While it al­lows to con­vey cat­e­gor­i­cal in­for­ma­tion quickly, quan­ti­ta­tive in­for­ma­tion is even more dif­fi­cult to de­code be­cause of the small sur­face area. For this is ad­vis­able to use multi-hue di­verg­ing colour palettes since the size of the font might re­strain the con­cep­tion of di­verse colours. When using the same colour on ex­ten­sive ob­jects and text, it should be ap­plied to the lat­ter with extra sat­u­ra­tion or dark­ness to coun­ter­act the small area.

The use of opac­ity may cause prob­lems for the leg­i­bil­ity. Just like ob­jects that do not stand out from the back­ground are hard to be spot­ted, let­ters that are too sim­i­lar to the back­ground can­not be read any­more. Ad­di­tion­ally, all changes of opac­ity (sim­i­lar to colour) should be stressed es­pe­cially on light­weight fonts to coun­ter­act the small sur­face area. A change of opac­ity is often more prac­ti­ca­ble when com­bined with a change of colour.

The ap­pli­ca­tion of a tex­ture highly de­pends on the type of tex­ture. Nor­mally, the sur­face of the font is smaller than typ­i­cal tex­tured ob­jects like for ex­am­ple coun­tries on a map. This can re­sult in an il­leg­i­bil­ity of the word and also an uniden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the ac­tual tex­ture. Es­pe­cially for small fonts this ty­po­graph­i­cal vari­able is not rec­om­mended. It is worth to men­tion that from a dis­tance the whole text ap­pears as one image and hence gains a tex­ture.

Size

The use of size to in­di­cate value is an al­ready com­mon prac­tise. Head­lines, sub-head­lines, body text and foot notes often use dif­fer­ent font-sizes to in­di­cate hi­er­ar­chy. Car­tog­ra­phy also makes great use of scal­ing in order to vi­su­alise im­por­tance of ob­jects. (Imhof, 2007) But rather than scal­ing con­tin­u­ously for ex­am­ple the height of moun­tains or the size of cities, they are often cat­e­gorised. Since the size of ir­reg­u­lar forms like let­ters is more dif­fi­cult to com­pare than the size of two reg­u­lar squares, the dis­crete val­ues are rather dif­fi­cult to ex­tract and should rather be treated as or­di­nal data.

Just like with the po­si­tion­ing of let­ters, words and sen­tences have an in­her­ent value: Words with more let­ters are longer, cap­i­tal let­ters are usu­ally higher than low­er­case let­ters. In the de­sign of maps, in­her­ent sizes often ca­suse bi­ases. As coun­tries with a greater land­mass ap­pear to be more im­por­tant, »big­ger« words also seem to be more im­por­tant. This prob­lem can be often seen with word clouds, which scale words for ex­am­ple in re­gard to their ap­pear­ance. When en­cod­ing with size, these points should be taken care of:

• Pro­por­tion As men­tioned above, the width and the height of a font should not be in­di­vid­u­ally scaled to pre­server their leg­i­bil­ity and aes­thetic.
• Word’s length Since the num­ber of let­ters is the main in­flu­ence on the word’s length and hence its ini­tial size, it is ad­vis­able to use words with the same let­ter length when­ever pos­si­ble. For this, ei­ther rep­re­sen­ta­tive ab­bre­vi­a­tions, short­cuts or codes can be used. For ex­am­ple, the ISO 3166 coun­try codes can be used when deal­ing with coun­tries, words can sim­ply be short­ened with an el­lip­sis or re­placed with an acronym. Mono­spaced fonts also help to com­pen­sate vary­ing let­ter width.
• Let­ter’s height Cap­i­tal let­ters can also help when en­cod­ing with size. Since cap­i­tal let­ters often have the same height it also makes them eas­ier to com­pare as they have an even ini­tial size. They also have a com­mon start­ing level as they have no as­cen­der or de­scen­ders.
• Min­i­mum size Ob­vi­ously, the scal­ing should have a min­i­mum value in order to main­tain the read­abil­ity of words. But this might also be a prob­lem: When the zero-point is at some min­i­mum text size, the com­par­i­son can be­come dif­fi­cult, as this min­i­mum size needs to be sub­tracted from the total size.

Sum­marised, one should use the size when

• com­par­i­son does not need to be exact and
• when none of the un­der­ly­ing data falls below a value that would re­sult in un­read­able text size or
• when the given words vary too much in their ini­tial size.

To main­tain leg­i­bil­ity, it is also rec­om­mended to al­ways scale width and height ac­cord­ingly and not in­di­vid­u­ally. When only the width is changed des­ig­nated fonts like com­pressed, con­densed or ex­tended should be used.

Be­sides the scal­ing of the words, the size could be ap­plied to the width or height of the »para­graph box«. When the text is long enough, the text boxes can im­i­tate the usage of bar charts, where the line-length cor­re­sponds to the value.

Ori­en­ta­tion

Dif­fer­ent ori­en­ta­tions can hardly be used with­out com­pro­mises on the text flow. While com­plete sen­tences or para­graphs can be read with vary­ing slopes, let­ters or words should only be care­fully ro­tated within sen­tences. Cor­rect ap­pli­ca­tions can often be found in car­tog­ra­phy, where let­ters fol­low the path of a river or a word ad­heres to the coast­line. In the same way an­gles are dif­fi­cult to ex­tract from ob­jects, the slope of a word can­not be de­coded with­out a doubt. Also as­cen­ders and de­scen­ders can in­crease this dif­fi­culty.

Ad­di­tional ty­po­graph­i­cal vari­ables

Over the course of hun­dreds of years, ty­po­graphic con­ven­tions were es­tab­lished that are unique in graph­i­cal dis­tinc­tion. These are often ad­di­tional graph­i­cal el­e­ments that can dis­tin­guish words. For ex­am­ple, the un­der­lin­ing of a word is clearly high­light­ing that word, while un­der­lin­ing a rec­tan­gle would not be di­rectly un­der­stood as high­lighted. With the Web’s grow­ing size, sig­nif­i­cance and level of ac­cess the un­der­lin­ing of text be­came a se­man­tic mean­ing: being a hy­per­link. Es­pe­cially in com­bi­na­tion with a blue or pur­ple text colour the as­so­ci­a­tion is wide­spread among Web users.

The high­light­ing of text pas­sages also works with char­ac­ters added at the be­gin­ning and end. This way markup lan­guages *highlight* words or de­clare <div>boxes</div> of con­tent. (But also in reg­u­lar usage paren­the­ses in­di­cate a de­val­u­a­tion.)

Con­clu­sion

Sum­marised, ty­po­graphic vari­ables con­tain par­al­lels to vi­su­al­i­sa­tion vari­ables and can be used as such within lim­its. Al­ways in con­sid­er­a­tion of the leg­i­bil­ity, ty­po­graphic dis­tinc­tions need to be ap­plied more care­fully than in reg­u­lar vi­su­al­i­sa­tions. In the same way vi­sual vari­ables are also not equally suit­able for every type of data, some ty­po­graphic vari­ables can used for qual­i­ta­tive val­ues only.

While the po­si­tion is widely re­garded as the best way to en­code in »nor­mal« vi­su­al­i­sa­tions, it needs spe­cial treat­ment with text in order to keep the read­ing order and flow. »Weaker« vi­su­al­i­sa­tion vari­ables like colour ap­pear to be more use­ful be­cause firstly, they do not dis­place the text cor­pus and sec­ondly allow for com­par­i­son across mul­ti­ple text lines, which is dif­fi­cult with a change of x-po­si­tion for ex­am­ple.

Ty­po­graphic con­ven­tions can be ben­e­fi­cial, but need to be treated with re­spect for cul­tural in­her­ent mean­ings. In gen­eral the pro­posed ty­po­graphic vi­su­al­i­sa­tions are not »as strong« as reg­u­lar vi­su­al­i­sa­tion. The ex­trac­tion of exact quan­ti­tive data is never as good as with graph­i­cal means. This is mainly due to the lack of a co­or­di­nate sys­tem that would give the user an ori­en­ta­tion and to the dis­tri­b­u­tion across mul­ti­ple lines that hin­ders com­par­i­son.

In con­clu­sion, the vi­su­al­i­sa­tion with ty­pog­ra­phy is mainly suit­able for or­di­nal and nom­i­nal data. Quan­ti­tive vi­su­al­i­sa­tions should only be used in a sup­port­ive role.

Why ad­here to text?

With vi­su­al­i­sa­tion as the seem­ingly so­lu­tion to all mod­ern prob­lems, the ques­tion arises why one should stick to text. The an­swer to this is based on the cul­tural im­print by the book. As pre­vi­ously stated it had a tremen­dous ef­fect on not only how knowl­edge is dis­trib­uted but also in the way we think. Habits formed con­ven­tions and today most peo­ple are used to ob­tain in­for­ma­tion from writ­ten text with its dis­cur­sive­ness, lin­ear­ity and ab­strac­tion. Mendelssohn be­wails how this has made us literati:

»We teach and in­struct one an­other only through writ­ings; we learn to know na­ture and man only from writ­ings.
We work and relax, edify and amuse our­selves through scrib­bling. The preacher doesn’t talk to his con­gre­ga­tion; he reads or re­cites to it some­thing he has writ­ten.
The teacher reads his writ­ten lec­tures from the podium. Every­thing is dead let­ter; the spirit of liv­ing con­ver­sa­tion has van­ished. […]
This has brought it about that man has al­most lost his value for his fel­low-man. We don’t try to meet with the wise man be­cause we find his wis­dom in his writ­ings. […]
In short, we are literati, men of let­ters.«

 — Mendelssohn, 2011

»Wir leh­ren und un­ter­rich­ten ein­an­der nur in Schrif­ten; ler­nen die Natur und die Men­schen ken­nen nur aus Schrif­ten; ar­bei­ten und er­ho­len, er­bau­en und er­göt­zen uns durch Schrei­be­rei; der Pre­di­ger un­ter­hält sich nicht mit sei­ner Ge­mein­de, er liest oder de­kla­miert ihr eine auf­ge­schrie­be­ne Ab­hand­lung vor.
Der Leh­rer auf dem Ka­the­der liest seine ge­schrie­be­nen Hefte ab. Alles ist toter Buch­sta­be, nir­gends Geist der le­ben­di­gen Un­ter­hal­tung. […]
Daher ist es ge­kom­men, dass der Mensch für den Men­schen fast sei­nen Wert ver­lo­ren hat. Der Um­gang des Wei­sen wird nicht ge­sucht; denn wir fin­den seine Weis­heit in Schrif­ten. […]
Mit einem Worte, wir sind lit­te­ra­ti, Buch­sta­ben­men­schen.«

 — Men­dels­sohn, 1989

I do not to want peo­ple to turn away from books as Mendelssohn’s text might sug­gest, but rather stress how many fields are framed by the book. Even today where the pro­duc­tion of im­ages is ef­fort­less as never be­fore, text does not dis­ap­pear. In­stead, new forms of text »types« evolve: Comic books, In­stant Mes­sag­ing and Twit­ter. In con­trast to the pes­simistic view of some writ­ers, we should utilise these tools for they are still forms of ex­pres­sion based on tex­tual com­mu­ni­ca­tion. While some de­scribe the printed book as »the per­fect read­ing-ma­chine« (Die per­fekte Lese­mas­chine, Reuß, 2014) I per­son­ally see much po­ten­tial for new forms of printed books, but even more for in­ter­ac­tive, re­spon­sive, il­lus­tra­tive ebooks or any form of tex­tual ex­pres­sion.

But the tri­umphant ad­vance of text has not only to do with ha­bit­u­a­tion. The lin­ear­ity, the dis­course and the ab­strac­tion might bring re­stric­tion but it also brings ad­van­tages over the vi­sual com­mu­ni­ca­tion. While im­ages allow the viewer to freely ex­plore the con­tent, text guides the reader through the in­for­ma­tion. The lin­ear­ity brings order, the dis­course al­lows to fol­low ar­gu­men­ta­tion. And with the abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate ab­stractly, text often al­lows to com­mu­ni­cate in­tan­gi­ble ideas.

For this the­sis I use the promi­nent sta­tus and the qual­i­ties of the text as start­ing point and en­hance its com­pre­hen­sion through the com­bi­na­tion with vi­su­al­i­sa­tions.

Why com­bine both?

These two dis­ci­plines – ty­pog­ra­phy and vi­su­al­i­sa­tion – are too often treated as two sep­a­rate things. Both work with vi­sual vari­ables that are ap­plied ac­cord­ing to the un­der­lay­ing data. Where ty­pog­ra­phy adds this data level to the text, vi­su­al­i­sa­tion works with graph­i­cal el­e­ments to com­mu­ni­cate the data.

In the book »Un­der­stand­ing Comics«, Scott Mc­Cloud il­lus­trates that words and im­ages are two ends on a scale from con­crete to ab­stract. (Mc­Cloud, 2001) He also shows how these two ends can in­ter­act with one an­other, each ful­fill­ing its own pur­pose. He ex­em­pli­fies this with »The Ad­ven­tures of Tintin«: The sim­ply, ab­stract drawn per­sons help the reader to iden­tify with them, be­cause their ap­pear­ance is not so de­ter­min­ing. On the other side, the de­tailed, con­crete back­ground shows the fan­tasy world the story takes place in.

But when ty­pog­ra­phy is ap­plied to the ab­stract text, it be­comes more graph­i­cal and hence more con­crete. On the other side, vi­su­al­i­sa­tions make use of graph­i­cal, iconic forms and thus make the im­ages more ab­stract. Ex­pand­ing Mc­Cloud’s model, the new order is: Im­ages — vi­su­al­i­sa­tions — vi­su­al­is­ing ty­pog­ra­phy — text. While most pub­li­ca­tions make only use of the ex­tremes of the spec­trum, my ap­proach in­vites the de­signer to use all »tools« of this range to tell a story.

But not only re­sults the com­bi­na­tion in a greater va­ri­ety of sto­ry­telling-el­e­ments for the sake of cross-me­di­al­ity, but also helps the reader to un­der­stand the con­tent. Al­brecht Dürer wrote in his text­book for the ado­les­cent youth al­ready that he wants to com­bine image and let­ter to en­hance mem­o­ra­bil­ity. (»Des­halb will ich das Wort und das Werk zam­men­tan, auf daß mans dest baß mer­ken müg.«) (Wen­zel, 2006) Sim­i­larly, the brain re­searcher Wolf Singer states that when our per­cep­tion is con­firmed by two stim­u­lus modal­i­ties, the per­ceived is eval­u­ated as to be the truth. For ex­am­ple when the eye sees an ob­ject that is also recog­nised by an­other sen­sory per­cep­tion, the as­sump­tion of what is »out there« is more rea­son­able. It passes the test of con­sen­sus. (Wen­zel, 2006) Even though this does not di­rectly jus­tify the use of dif­fer­ent en­cod­ings within one sen­sory medium, it paves the way to this re­search: And in­deed the com­bi­na­tion of im­ages and words has been sci­en­tif­i­cally stud­ied by a num­ber of re­searchers. Most of the re­sults sup­port the the­ory of »dual cod­ing« by Mayer et al. (1999 in Ware, 2004). »They sug­gest that if ac­tive pro­cess­ing or re­lated ma­te­r­ial takes place in both vi­sual and ver­bal cog­ni­tive sub­sys­tems, learn­ing will be bet­ter.« (Ware, 2004) Sum­marised, this shows how an in­creased ex­ploita­tion can be achieved through the com­bi­na­tion of text and image.

One study that fol­lowed this the­sis’ ap­proach from the other side was con­ducted by Chan­dler and Sweller (1991 in Ware, 2004). It ex­am­ined the in­te­gra­tion of text di­rectly in­side graph­ics. Their test graphic — a di­a­gram with op­er­at­ing in­struc­tions — had text snip­pets di­rectly placed at the rel­e­vant point. Their suc­cess­ful ex­per­i­ment was jus­ti­fied by the »lim­ited-ca­pac­ity work­ing mem­ory«. »They argue that when the in­for­ma­tion is in­te­grated, there is a re­duced need to store in­for­ma­tion tem­porar­ily while switch­ing back and forth be­tween lo­ca­tions.« (Ware, 2004) This is often jus­ti­fied by the cog­ni­tive load the­ory. As the the­ory says, our work­ing mem­ory is lim­ited. Hence ob­ject and key should be close to­gether to re­duce in­for­ma­tion that needs to be stored tem­po­rally in our mem­ory. It may be ex­pected that this con­cept per­forms in the same way with im­ages di­rectly in­te­grated into the text.

Other psy­cho­log­i­cal stud­ies on read­ing com­pre­hen­sion can also be in­ter­preted to sup­port the the­sis’ ap­proach. Per­rig and Kintsch (1985 in Müsseler et. al, 2002) de­scribed a fic­ti­tious city first from a bird’s per­spec­tive (»north of the high­way and east of the river is a gas sta­tion«) and sec­ondly from a dri­ving per­spec­tive (»When cross­ing the river, you see a gas sta­tion to your left«). Can­di­dates who re­ceived the bird’s per­spec­tive were less able to re­peat the text, but in­stead could eas­ily draw a map. (Müsseler et. al, 2002) It can be ex­pected to sup­port mem­o­ra­bil­ity when rep­re­sent­ing the in­for­ma­tion for ex­am­ple in dri­ving per­spec­tive as text and from a bird’s view on a map. It needs to be eval­u­ated in fur­ther re­search if this »dual cod­ing« men­tioned be­fore also helps when text and image hold dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives.

An­other rea­son, why the com­bi­na­tion of these two pro­vide ad­di­tional in­sight, lays in the fre­quently given rea­son­ing for vi­su­al­i­sa­tion. For this, the Anscombe’s quar­tet is often used. After pre­sent­ing ta­bles with num­bers, vi­su­al­iz­ing the same num­bers in di­a­grams seems ob­vi­ous and con­ve­nient. And in­deed it is much eas­ier to com­pare and spot trends and pat­terns with the di­a­grams. But one thing is often ne­glected: The table »ex­presses […] val­ues pre­cisely and it pro­vides an ef­fi­cient means to look up val­ues for a par­tic­u­lar […]« di­men­sion. (Few, 2014) For some graph­ics, the un­der­lay­ing data might even not be ex­tractable at all. For most ap­pli­ca­tions that is ab­solutely valid: The more data points you have, the less im­por­tant the sin­gle one be­come. Vi­su­al­i­sa­tions’ pur­pose is to serve for im­pres­sion, rather than exact num­bers. As John Tukey states, it is bet­ter to be »ap­prox­i­mately right rather than ex­actly wrong«. (Tukey, 1965) What should be taken from this is that both »vi­su­al­i­sa­tions«  — table and graphic — have an unique qual­ity, which are ad­vis­able for dif­fer­ent set­tings. And the same holds true for text. Through the com­bi­na­tion of these dif­fer­ent forms the reader can de­cide which one suit his in­ter­est or abil­ity to ex­tract the data best.

These qual­i­ties can be ex­em­pli­fied by un­cer­tainty and di­ver­sity. While vi­su­al­is­ing un­cer­tainty is gain­ing more at­ten­tion in re­cent time (Pot­ter et al., 2012), text can often more eas­ily ex­press this un­cer­tainty. And in other cases, where the ver­bal ex­press­ing gen­er­alises and la­bels in­for­ma­tion (Drucker, 2014), vi­su­al­i­sa­tion can demon­strate di­ver­sity.

Each form can com­pen­sate the dif­fi­cul­ties of the other and can even help to over­come the lack of ex­pres­sion in text in gen­eral. As Marc Davis wrote in re­gard to emo­jis: »they are best used as an ‘ad­junct’ to text — es­pe­cially in so­cial media — help­ing to make up for the the lack of ges­tures, fa­cial ex­pres­sions and in­to­na­tion found in speech.« (Stern, 2015) And while this might seem only ap­plic­a­ble for emo­jis, graphic nov­els show us how anger, fear or gen­tle­ness can be ex­pressed through type. Hence, the mix­ture of mul­ti­ple sources of in­for­ma­tion cre­ates »a more com­plete image«, re­sult­ing in a greater ex­ploita­tion for read­ers.

The im­pres­sion an user is given by vi­su­al­i­sa­tions can also be used as ben­e­fit: Wil­lett et al. de­scribe the con­cept of Scented Wid­gets which act as »em­bed­ded vi­su­al­iza­tions that fa­cil­i­tate nav­i­ga­tion in in­for­ma­tion spaces«. (Wil­lett et al., 2007) The idea be­hind this ap­proach is to give users a pre­view (a scent) of what they are about to see, when they click on the equipped wid­get. Be­cause of the sim­plis­tic ap­pear­ance users are able to com­pare mul­ti­ple el­e­ments of in­for­ma­tion (or in this case choices) at once.

What needs to be con­sid­ered is that not all text es­pe­cially lit­er­a­ture »wants« to be equipped with ad­di­tional graph­ics. As these vi­su­al­i­sa­tions can add the ap­pear­ance of an analy­sis and sta­tis­ti­cal ef­fort, one needs to ac­cept that es­pe­cially lyri­cal texts are often not meant to be analysed by math­e­mat­i­cal means.

Sum­marised, de­part­ments too often ad­here to their medium: Jour­nal­ists to text, fi­nanciers to ta­bles, de­sign­ers to graph­ics. Each dis­ci­pline should more often use the ad­e­quate pre­sen­ta­tion for the mes­sage. Or as this the­sis shows: A com­bi­na­tion.

Why Micro Vi­su­al­i­sa­tion?

The com­bi­na­tion of text and vi­su­al­i­sa­tion can be ap­proached from many di­rec­tions. Be­sides the aim to cre­ate a bal­ance be­tween the two, the focus could be ei­ther on the ver­bal or on the graph­i­cal side. For this the­sis I will focus on text with vi­su­al­i­sa­tions em­bed­ded. There are six rea­sons for that:

• Based on the pre­vi­ously dis­cussed con­sid­er­a­tions on the his­tory of com­mu­ni­ca­tion I have come to be­lieve that text is still human’s main medium of knowl­edge im­par­ta­tion. And even with­out the as­pect of ad­di­tional graph­i­cal vi­su­al­i­sa­tions that is dis­cussed in this the­sis, the re­search to en­hance this stan­dard text pre­sen­ta­tion through ty­po­graph­i­cal vi­su­al­i­sa­tions is valu­able for this field.
• In re­gard to the first point I be­lieve that an ad­duc­tion to vi­su­al­i­sa­tion for the gen­eral pub­lic could be best achieved with sim­ple graph­ics em­bed­ded right into the fa­mil­iar medium. The sim­pli­fi­ca­tion is the first step to make them ac­ces­si­ble to a broader au­di­ence. With chang­ing read­ing con­ven­tions and the ac­cep­tance of this novel sources of in­for­ma­tion, more com­plex vi­su­al­i­sa­tions can be used in mass media.
• The use of both text and im­ages is claimed to have a higher ef­fi­ciency than sin­gle-chan­nel en­cod­ing. One as­pect that is cru­cial for this dual-cod­ing and also for the con­cept of this the­sis is the con­nec­tion be­tween these two lev­els. That sup­ports the de­ci­sion to di­rectly in­te­grate the vi­su­al­i­sa­tion in­side the text to pro­vide this kind of link.
• Ob­vi­ously this link needs to be ex­plicit in order to con­nect cor­re­spond­ing el­e­ments. (Ware, 2004) Ex­per­i­ments by Zell­weger et al. (2000 in Gof­fin et al. 2014) eval­u­ated the po­si­tion­ing of meta-in­for­ma­tion re­lated to hy­per­links in mar­gins, foot­notes or in­line. »They found a large vari­abil­ity in par­tic­i­pants’ pref­er­ences but ob­served that, in gen­eral, it was de­sir­able to keep meta-in­for­ma­tion close to the orig­i­nal link. Where in­for­ma­tion was placed also had a sig­nif­i­cant im­pact on read­ing speed with in­for­ma­tion close to the links being read sig­nif­i­cantly faster.« (Gof­fin et al., 2014) Even though deal­ing with dif­fer­ent in­for­ma­tion these re­sults are a con­fir­ma­tion for the usage of in­line vi­su­al­i­sa­tions for bet­ter and quicker com­pre­hen­sion.
• Pre­vi­ous re­search in the field of vi­su­al­i­sa­tion has been mostly to­wards com­plex, data-rich graph­ics. I see a gen­eral need for smaller, sim­pler vi­su­al­i­sa­tions. As the media con­sump­tion tends to­wards mo­bile, con­tent needs to be de­signed for the smaller dis­play sizes. (Noirhomme-Frai­ture et al., 2005) And with screens be­com­ing cheaper and with OLED tech­nol­ogy also more en­ergy ef­fi­cient so that they can be used for even more and also smaller de­vices like smart­watches, pho­tog­ra­phy lenses or elec­tronic tooth­brushes, vi­su­al­i­sa­tion need to be specif­i­cally de­signed for this size. The »In­ter­net of Things« is be­com­ing in­evitably a re­al­ity and all the de­vices hold op­por­tu­ni­ties for vi­su­al­i­sa­tions of the ob­jects’ data. With their lim­ited out­put ca­pac­i­ties, the vi­su­al­i­sa­tion of their sta­tus is a cru­cial as­pect. But not only for ex­plicit small dis­plays, but also for vary­ing out­put de­vices small vi­su­al­i­sa­tion can be eas­ier adopted to the avail­able space.
• But also in time cru­cial en­vi­ron­ments like news­pa­pers Micro Vi­su­al­i­sa­tions can be help­ful. Smaller graph­ics are often eas­ier to pro­duce. Es­pe­cially with the pro­posed ty­po­graphic vi­su­al­i­sa­tions, this type of vi­su­al­i­sa­tion can also be cre­ated using am­a­teur soft­ware like Mi­crosoft Word. In­stead of aim­ing for com­plex and costly graph­ics, the op­tions pos­si­ble with the avail­able means are often not taken into ac­count.
• As we can see from the three stages of per­cep­tion: We see be­fore we read. Using vi­sual and ty­po­graphic vari­ables that con­vey the con­tent vi­su­ally al­lows the reader to com­pre­hend the struc­ture and pos­si­bly also parts of the con­tent be­fore read­ing. Es­pe­cially colour that pops out from the rest can guide the reader to rel­e­vant parts.

Rel­e­vance

With the de­riva­tion of my ap­proach in the last chap­ters, I will now fur­ther ex­plain its rel­e­vance in a cul­tural and tech­no­log­i­cal per­spec­tive and elab­o­rate its rel­e­vance and im­pli­ca­tions for de­sign. In the last part I will ex­plain my own mo­ti­va­tion for the ap­proach.

Cul­tural and tech­no­log­i­cal rel­e­vance

Tech­nol­ogy and cul­ture fol­low each other, fa­cil­i­tate and de­mand each other, de­pend on each other. The his­tory of com­mu­ni­ca­tion is a his­tory of tech­nol­ogy. Nowa­days, as tech­nol­ogy changes so rapidly, our be­hav­iour highly de­pends on our tech­nol­ogy usage. Our life is more than ever de­fined by de­vices and their in­her­ent func­tion­ing. As these de­vices be­come more com­pli­cated to use we need to learn how to use them, learn to un­der­stand their out­put. The data gen­er­ated by our com­put­ers and its amount is often be­yond our un­der­stand­ing. But not only ab­stract data comes in an over­whelm­ing amount. Also news, in­for­ma­tion of rel­e­vance or daily im­pres­sions in­un­date our life. The de­mand for sort­ing, con­tex­tu­al­i­sa­tion and fil­ter­ing be­comes stronger every day. In the fol­low­ing sec­tions. I show how my the­sis re­lates to these prob­lems.

Ris­ing quan­ti­ties

McLuhan’s »im­plo­sion« (McLuhan, 2011) of the world brings peo­ple to­gether in quan­ti­ties that have never been pos­si­ble be­fore. Elec­tron­i­cally processed in­for­ma­tion al­lows higher rates and greater amounts of data. Peo­ple nowa­days take a thou­sand pic­tures in their hol­i­days, com­pa­nies trade with goods in quan­ti­ties of mil­lions, coun­tries have GDPs in bil­lions of dol­lars. But be­sides higher di­men­sions we also mea­sure smaller and smaller di­men­sions. Charles and Ray Eames’s short film »Pow­ers of Ten« (Eames, 1977) il­lus­trates this im­pres­sively: start­ing from above a cou­ple hav­ing break­fast, the cam­era zooms out until it reaches the limit of our vi­sion 100 mil­lion lightyears away and then zooms in to a sin­gle pro­ton with a size of 0.0001 ångströms. And also Gavin Schmidt de­scribes our ca­pa­bil­i­ties to al­ready mea­sure 14 or­ders of mag­ni­tude of weather data: »from the small mi­cro­scopic par­ti­cles that seed clouds to the size of the planet it­self«. (Schmidt, 2014) The re­cently pop­u­lated term »big data« (which seems to have be­come a buzz­word es­pe­cially in busi­ness) is used for the ris­ing quan­ti­ties of data that are being cap­tured through the elec­tron­i­cal pro­cess­ing of sci­en­tific cal­cu­la­tions and mea­sure­ments, fi­nan­cial trans­ac­tions, elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tion and in­ter­net traf­fic in gen­eral. Com­pa­nies like Google, Ama­zon, or Face­book, but also sci­en­tific in­sti­tu­tions like the CERN or na­tional agen­cies like the NSA use these data and the ris­ing com­put­ing power to find pre­vi­ously un­de­tectable pat­terns and in­sights. To em­pha­size this im­por­tance, the World Eco­nomic Forum rises the sta­tus of data to be the new oil. (World Eco­nomic Forum, 2011)

Com­put­ers allow us to process this amount of quan­ti­ties, but it seems that our lan­guage lacks be­hind the tech­no­log­i­cal progress: The dif­fer­ence be­tween two pieces and a mil­lion pieces is tremen­dous and still the Eng­lish and Ger­man lan­guages for ex­am­ple have only two modes to de­scribe quan­ti­ties: sin­gu­lar and plural. Some other lan­guages have more forms of ex­pres­sion quan­ti­ties. Gravel G. Cor­bett sum­marises these in his book »Num­ber« (2000): Some lan­guages have dual, trial and (de­bata­bally) quadrals. For ex­am­ple the Upper Sor­bian lan­guage can dif­fer­en­ti­ate be­tween »you« (»ty«), »you two« (»wój«), and »you (all)« (»wy«). Ac­cord­ingly, the trial and quadral ex­presses the amount of three re­spec­tively four. Other lan­guages allow for a dis­tinc­tion of sin­gu­lar, pau­cal and plural. The pau­cal can be de­scribed as »small plural«, often used for quan­ti­ties be­tween two or to six. It can be found for ex­am­ple in Lihir, an Oceanic lan­guage spo­ken on a group of is­lands next to Papua New Guinea. They use five forms: Sin­gu­lar, dual, trial, pau­cal and plural. What can also be found is a split in the plural, to dif­fer­en­ti­ate amounts of many. This serves for var­i­ous func­tions: In the Ara­bic lan­guage for ex­am­ple it dis­cerns be­tween a gen­eral form (»debbānten« : flies) or the ex­pres­sion of abun­dance (»dababīn« : many flies). In Kayte­tye (an Arandic lan­guage spo­ken in Cen­tral Aus­tralia) the two forms of plural dis­cern be­tween many and »all the x in the uni­verse of dis­course«. Two last ex­am­ples come from the Celtic lan­guage Bre­ton that de­scribes »chil­dren« (»bu­gal-e«) and »groups of chil­dren« (»bu­gal-e-où«) and the Warekena lan­guage (an Arawakan lan­guage spo­ken in Brazil and Venezuela) that can ex­press »pigs« (»abida-pe«), »very many pigs« (»abida-nawi«) and »very many pigs in­deed, too many to count« (»abida-pe-nawi«) by com­pos­ing dif­fer­ent forms in one word. (Cor­bett, 2000)

What can be ex­tracted from this ex­cur­sus is that in fact very few lan­guages have forms to dif­fer­en­ti­ate be­tween mul­ti­ple quan­ti­ties and it may be ex­pected to cause trans­la­tion and un­der­stand­ing prob­lems in other lan­guages that lack these forms. What vi­su­al­i­sa­tion can con­tribute here is the prob­a­bly uni­ver­sally un­der­stand­able form of ex­press­ing such quan­ti­ties. Amounts of »two«, »tree«, »all«, »groups of mul­ti­ple« and »too many to count« can be eas­ily com­mu­ni­cated in an image.

Im­ages of vi­su­alised quan­ti­ties gain im­por­tance for two rea­sons:

• First, many lan­guages do not pro­vide meth­ods to ex­press amounts ac­cen­tu­ated. Ob­vi­ously miss­ing gram­mat­i­cal forms can be com­pen­sated by fur­ther tex­tual ex­pres­sions, but these sup­ple­ments often fail in con­cise­ness and uni­ver­sal­ity.
• The sec­ond as­pect is based on the ris­ing amounts of data. Be­cause nowa­days the im­por­tance of an ob­ject re­lies so much on its un­der­lay­ing quan­ti­ties it needs to be di­rectly in­te­grated and con­nected.

In gen­eral, the data of an ob­ject be­comes so im­por­tant that this in­for­ma­tion should be placed to­gether with the ob­ject.

Tech­no­log­i­cal change

Pro­cess­ing in tech­nol­ogy de­mands re­design. Every time a new medium is in­vented it is treated in the way the old tech­nol­ogy was used. It takes time to adapt the usage to new input meth­ods, faster trans­mis­sion or greater range. I be­lieve we live in a time where the ap­pli­ca­tion of tech­nol­ogy is lack­ing be­hind the pos­si­bil­i­ties tech­nol­ogy would allow.

Scott Klein showed in his talk »The for­got­ten His­tory of News Graph­ics« (2014) that news­pa­pers that pub­lished vi­su­al­i­sa­tions in the 1840s needed to build these graph­ics out of let­ters or other sym­bols. For ro­tated el­e­ments they needed to build spe­cial con­struc­tions in the com­pos­ing gal­ley. With the in­ven­tion of off­set print, this ef­fort has been dra­mat­i­cally re­duced. El­e­ments can be freely com­pos­ited dig­i­tally but still the de­sign of the book has not changed much in the last 500 years. Now with the emer­gence of new dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy the text lay­out is even less re­stricted to the clas­si­cal de­sign. But often the lay­out of books, posters or web­sites still keeps the form the let­ter­press re­quired. Dig­i­tal print­ing and dis­play­ing meth­ods would allow ab­solute free­dom over the book’s lay­out, but is »re­strained by con­ven­tions of de­sign and read­ing«. (Drucker, 2014) McLuhan spoke about this ever-re­peat­ing at­ti­tude in an in­ter­view in 1969:

»Theirs is the cus­tom­ary human re­ac­tion when con­fronted with in­no­va­tion: to floun­der about at­tempt­ing to adapt old re­sponses to new sit­u­a­tions or to sim­ply con­demn or ig­nore the har­bin­gers of change — a prac­tice re­fined by the Chi­nese em­per­ors, who used to ex­e­cute mes­sen­gers bring­ing bad news.
The new tech­no­log­i­cal en­vi­ron­ments gen­er­ate the most pain among those least pre­pared to alter their old value struc­tures.The literati find the new elec­tronic en­vi­ron­ment far more threat­en­ing than do those less com­mit­ted to lit­er­acy as a way of life. When an in­di­vid­ual or so­cial group feels that its whole iden­tity is jeop­ar­dized by so­cial or psy­chic change, its nat­ural re­ac­tion is to lash out in de­fen­sive fury. But for all their lamen­ta­tions, the rev­o­lu­tion has al­ready taken place.«

— McLuhan, 1969

As he states, the »literati« are balk­ing at the change, and I be­lieve that non-spe­cial­ists from other dis­ci­plines can help the fu­ture book to find its form But this needs to hap­pen not only for the sake of change, but there is also a de­mand: Dig­i­tally pub­lished books can­not be de­signed in the same way ana­log let­ter­press books were de­signed, but need to con­sider vary­ing read­ing en­vi­ron­ments, ma­te­ri­als and dif­fer­ent read­ing be­hav­iours. Myers et al. state that we also need to »cre­ate user in­ter­faces that work with vastly dif­fer­ent sizes«. (Myers et al., 2000) Their ar­ti­cle form March 2000 shows that dif­fer­ence of dis­plays »are fac­tors of over 1000 in num­ber of pix­els and 100 for size«, where it is note­wor­thy to men­tion that the high­est res­o­lu­tion wall-sized dis­play they de­scribe was used by the Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity and had a sim­i­lar pixel num­ber to the lap­top this the­sis is writ­ten on 15 years later. In re­cent time, re­spon­sive web de­sign evolved as an an­swer to this prob­lem. Lay­outs from web­sites can now be specif­i­cally de­fined for every res­o­lu­tion. Since every dis­play size leads to dif­fer­ent read­ing dis­tance as well, Oliver Re­ichen­stein of iA dis­cusses the con­cept of re­spon­sive ty­pog­ra­phy. (Re­ichen­stein, 2012) He dis­tin­guishes be­tween the met­ric and the per­ceived size of the text. Since the met­ric size nor­mally stays fixed on var­i­ous de­vices the per­ceived size varies. He de­mands a fixed per­ceived size and hence an adap­tion of the met­ric size for each de­vice’s read­ing dis­tance.

But not only should the book’s de­sign adapt to the user’s needs, but also ex­plore newly formed op­tions. Some avant-garde ana­log books al­ready ex­plore these pos­si­bil­i­ties. Jonathan Safran Foer’s book »Ex­tremely loud and in­cred­i­bly close« is an ex­am­ple of ex­per­i­men­tal ty­pog­ra­phy. Con­verg­ing and drift­ing apart text, marked and crossed out words, hand­writ­ing and pho­tographs are used through­out the book. The book uses the pos­si­bil­i­ties of mod­ern ty­pog­ra­phy to sup­port its con­tent, the pro­tag­o­nist’s thoughts and ac­tiv­ity and the over­all mood of the book.

Drucker states that the cur­rent »new writ­ing modes are shaped by so­cial media, by email, blogs, Twit­ter, and wikis. In these chang­ing con­ven­tions the sur­face of in­ter­face often con­ceals the back-end tech­ni­cal and con­cep­tual processes by which they are pro­duced.« (Drucker, 2014) As with all elec­tron­i­cal de­vices, the ap­pear­ance is sep­a­rated from the func­tion. Dig­i­tally pub­lished text for ex­am­ple is often de­signed for in­ter­ac­tion. Face­book users can »like« every­thing pub­lished with­out need­ing to know how the servers store the »Like«. Only the metaphoric thumbs up icon brings the process back to the per­cep­ti­ble re­al­ity of the user. Other ex­am­ples for these in­ter­ac­tive texts are the plat­form Medium.com which al­lows for com­ment­ing sin­gle para­graphs, the browser plu­gin Dic­tio­nary of Num­bers, which wants to »put num­bers in human terms« by trans­lat­ing num­bers like 86 mil­lion on web­sites into fa­mil­iar terms, and Google Docs en­ables si­mul­ta­ne­ous work on a sin­gle doc­u­ment. Thus one might say that the dis­play of the text be­comes the in­ter­face of the text.

An­dries van Dam de­mands in­ter­faces to »enabl[e] and em­power[…] peo­ple to be cre­ative, pro­duc­tive, and less con­strained by the lim­i­ta­tions cur­rently im­posed by the tech­nol­ogy.« (van Dam, 2001) My con­cern is that cur­rently only few take ad­van­tage of what tech­nol­ogy al­ready en­ables us to do. The given ex­am­ples are by lead­ing com­pa­nies or in­de­pen­dent de­sign­ers. The media con­sumed by the cen­tre of the so­ci­ety is still dom­i­nated by clas­sic text for­mats. We need more ex­per­i­ments and im­ple­men­ta­tions of be­hav­iour that would not be pos­si­ble with let­ter­press tech­nol­ogy and show how com­mu­ni­ca­tion can be al­tered for good or also for bad. A change many in­dus­tries who de­pended on the old tech­nol­ogy seek for. Jour­nal­ism for ex­am­ple is strug­gling with an iden­tity cri­sis as its for­mer dis­tri­b­u­tion and speed is not com­pat­i­ble with peo­ple’s usage of the in­ter­net. A new role and a dif­fer­ent form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion could help over­come its prob­lems. As com­pa­nies search for in­for­ma­tion within their big data, news­pa­pers as ex­pounders of the world might seek for an­swers in the same data pools. As ex­plained above, the use of vi­su­al­i­sa­tions helps to ex­plore as well as to com­mu­ni­cate these find­ings.

Sum­marised, dig­i­tally pro­duced and pub­lished books or other essay forms allow for a form that com­bines mul­ti­ple medi­ums within one. »Dig­i­tal media have be­come the meta-medium par ex­cel­lence, able to ab­sorb and re-me­di­ate all pre­vi­ous forms in a fluid en­vi­ron­ment in which remix­ing and cul­ture jam­ming are the com­mon cur­rency.« (Bur­dick et al., 2012, p. 15)

In­for­ma­tion over­flow

We live in a time where »in­for­ma­tion gen­tly but re­lent­lessly driz­zles down on us in an in­vis­i­ble, im­pal­pa­ble elec­tric rain.« (von Baeyer, 2003) To find sense in these data is our daily chal­lenge. Com­pa­nies like Google spe­cialise in this sense mak­ing by mak­ing avail­able web­sites search­able. But even when we quickly find re­sources, the chal­lenge to quickly com­pre­hend and eval­u­ate the given con­tent re­mains.

One so­lu­tion to this analy­sis of this con­tent is the cat­e­gori­sa­tion of ob­jects. This has been a long prac­tise for li­braries or dic­tio­nar­ies in order to sort and later find in­for­ma­tion quicker. For this, ob­jects are sorted into cat­e­gories and sub­cat­e­gories, which can be eas­ily nav­i­gated top-down. Cross-ref­er­ences also allow for links be­tween ob­jects. This way they stay in their place while still being con­nected. The whole in­ter­net is built upon the same struc­ture: web­sites con­tain links that bring the users to the next web­site. When web­sites are or­gan­ised in this way it can help users to quicker find rel­e­vant con­tent. But not al­ways is this struc­ture vis­i­ble. The UTS Li­brary for ex­am­ple il­lus­trates its cat­a­logue with a stacked bar. Each colour rep­re­sents one sub­ject and its width rep­re­sents the amount of books in this field. Each el­e­ment also acts as nav­i­ga­tion and splits out to more colours that rep­re­sent sub­cat­e­gories. This Micro Vi­su­al­i­sa­tion il­lus­trates the com­plete cat­a­logue con­sist­ing of thou­sand of books in a mem­o­ris­able, nav­i­ga­ble, and com­pact way.

But also after the cor­rect web­site is found on Google and on this web­site the rel­e­vant page is found, the pre­sented doc­u­ment may be hard to com­pre­hend. And again Micro Vi­su­al­i­sa­tion can help. Vi­su­al­i­sa­tions can for ex­am­ple act as an overview of the struc­ture, they can help to find rel­e­vant points by »pop­ping-out«, or they can show the in­for­ma­tion in its con­text.

When there is so much in­for­ma­tion from dif­fer­ent sources the con­text be­comes more im­por­tant. To pro­vide the user with this in­for­ma­tion but not over­whelm him is cru­cial. For this it is help­ful to pro­vide the reader with fur­ther in­for­ma­tion he can ac­cess if nec­es­sary. This con­cept matches Shnei­der­man’s »Overview first, […] then de­tails-on-de­mand« mantra in its basic con­cept. While Shnei­der­man’s start­ing point is also a vi­su­al­i­sa­tion, my ap­proach starts with the text in which the user can »zoom« to fur­ther in­for­ma­tion on de­mand through a vi­su­al­i­sa­tion.

To pro­vide the user with ori­en­ta­tion, nav­i­ga­tion, and com­pre­hen­sion aids does not only help the reader, but also makes the con­tent find­able and ac­ces­si­ble in the great amount of in­for­ma­tion given. There­fore the au­thor should strongly sup­port this process by not only pre­sent­ing raw text or the »ten blue links«.