One of my favorite Woody Allen quips from his tragically short period as a stand-up comic is the punch line to his hyperbolic story about taking a speed-reading course and then digesting all of War and Peace in twenty minutes. The audience begins to giggle at the silliness of reading Tolstoy’s massive tome in a brief sitting. Allen then kills them with his summary of the book: “It’s about Russia.” The joke came to mind recently as I read the self-congratulatory blog post by IBM’s Many Eyes visualization project, applauding their first month on the web. (And I’m feeling a little embarrassed by my post on the one-year anniversary of this blog.) The Many Eyes researchers point to successes such as this groundbreaking visualization of the New Testament:
News flash: Jesus is a big deal in the New Testament. Even exploring the “network” of figures who are “mentioned together” (ostensibly the point of this visualization) doesn’t provide the kind of insight that even a first-year student in theology could provide over coffee. I have been slow to appreciate the power of textual visualization—in large part because I’ve seen far too many visualizations like this one, that merely use computational methods to reveal the obvious in fancy ways.
I’ve been doing some research on visualizations of texts recently for my next book (on digital scholarship), and trying to get over this aversion to visualizations. But when I see visualizations like this one, the lesson is clear: Make sure your visualizations expose something new, hidden, non-obvious.
Because War and Peace isn’t about Russia.
Comments
[…] has some promise as a teaching tool (not so much as a research tool) is Many Eyes. As my colleague Dan Cohen has already pointed out, Many Eyes visualizations can be very misleading when we use them to try to […]
[…] Cohen, “It’s About Russia,” DanCohen.org, 6 March […]
[…] a lot of my 24 page paper was lost in this little exercise. Dan Cohen suggests in his paper “It’s About Russia“, visualizations of data should expose something new, something not readily apparent. I can […]
[…] Trying to communicate the issues here, I find myself echoing Dan Cohen’s sentiments when he likened a visualization of the New Testament prominently featuring Jesus, to saying of War and Peace: “It’s about Russia.” […]
[…] I found my experiences with Wordle to be an incredible let down. Initially I was excited. I went to the website, I looked at some of the examples and I thought, “Alright! here we go! lets have some fun!!” I tried it out on a few documents and quickly began to realize that Wordle really wasn’t doing anything except pointing out the obvious. I began to relate with Daniel Cohen and his exhaustion with the use of visual material as outlined in his blog post, “It’s About Russia.” […]
[…] continue to uphold the integrity of the profession, eliminate biases, and above all, as noted by Dan Cohen, ensure that they are not just pretty pictures but advance new knowledge. Although I am not amazed […]
[…] illustration used in the article “Its about Russia” written by Dan Cohen was very interesting. I looked at this visual a long time reading all the […]