Abstract. Since the advent of movable type, text has been the predominant mode of non-verbal communication. Today, a deluge of data and demand for business intelligence are overwhelming traditional textual, tabular, and simple charting forms of analysis and presentation. Visualization tools are now available to substantially improve human analytical capabilities. However, the rate at which these tools are being inserted into the business sector has not kept pace with their adoption by the scientific and engineering communities. Indeed business people may be less inclined towards visual analysis than the scientists (and artists) who are driving these technologies. Visualization is an important mode of learning and thinking and businesses which master it will have an advantage in perceiving changing patterns and new phenomena in the global economy.
 

Introduction.

To many lay people an economist is someone who provides interest rate forecasts of slightly greater validity and less utility than the forecasts found on the weather channel. However, at its heart—and, yes economists do come equipped with them—economics is a disciplined way of determining how limited resources, including time, people, and information, can be used most productively. Since productivity growth and technology are economic soulmates, a business economist may be able to shed some light on visual analytics use, or lack thereof, in economics and the related fields of business and finance. In these fields, economic analysis is both as compatible with and underutilized as visual analytics. It may be a cliché to say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but to an economist that represents an excellent exchange rate and one that is bound to appreciate given the explosion in productivity enhancing visualization tools. Let's take a quick look back in time to put contemporary visualization tools in context to try to understand why there might be some resistance to their adoption.

According to Denise Schmandt-Besserat's research in Iraq, several thousand years before the development of writing three dimensional tokens were used as devices for counting property and resources . For example, a tetrahedron stood for a unit of labor, a cylinder stood for a head of livestock. The token system allowed data to be collected, manipulated, stored and retrieved. With Sarbanes-Oxley only a few millennia away, accountants recognized the need to drill down into increasing levels of categorization denoting qualitative attributes of their assets as well as the quantity. They devised tokens which distinguished, not just an hour of labor from a head of livestock, but a large male ox from a small, young ewe.

As records took up more and more space, the bulky three dimensional tokens were used to make impressions on tablets, thereby producing a more efficient "3-D slim" version of the inventory list. These impressions may have been the immediate precursors to cuneiform script, the oldest known system of writing invented in the fourth millennium B.C., and the initial push away from the visual and towards a text based information storage systems.

While two dimensional manuscripts represented a technological advance, their use as a general method of communication was hampered until the invention of the printing press reduced production costs and more broadly based educations systems increased literacy. Knowledge grew, but was still communicated to a mostly illiterate populace either orally or visually. Hand copied books, richly illustrated maps and cathedral windows stored information about what was then known of the world. Most people could not read the inscriptions, but they could understand the contextual presentation of stellar constellations and earthly seasons the order of the heavens and earth as depicted in a magnificent Gothic Rose window. The more learned clerics used these much like PowerPoint slides to instruct their flock. .

The advent of movable type was to change all that. Certainly it was marginally easier to carry around a Gutenberg Bible than a stained glass window depicting the same stories. For the next few centuries the economics were black and white favoring mass produced texts over unique visual masterpieces for purposes of communication. While a picture was still worth a thousand words, a thousand words were now cheaper to produce. However, linear text as a store of knowledge lacks the contextual information of a richly designed visual which could bring order to the heavens in the artistic splendor of stained glass.

The Present. Today we are witnessing a paradigm shift: individual bits of information -- not only text, but numbers, images and other data forms as well -- are cheap, but their volume makes them expensive to process in traditional ways. As the cost declines, computer storage capacity rises outstripping the growth in human analytical capacity and resulting in a bottleneck. Six thousand years ago clay tokens were cheap individually but expensive to process in the aggregate and text was invented, eventually displacing more visual forms of communication. Paradoxically, today's visual tools can substantially enhance our capacity to analyze text and other data streams. The last decade has seen rapid advances in visualization tools which have contributed greatly to the analytical capabilities for scientific research and national security assessment. Given increased global competition and the need for rapid assessment of market changes and economic trends, why hasn't the business sector made greater use of these same tools?

Note: Much as visual art ranges from the realism of a Steichen photograph to the abstraction of a Kandinsky painting, symbolic representations range from the image based picture to the abstract diagram with many possibilities in between. A rose window lies somewhere along on this spectrum with the individual symbolic images of a dove or a deity arranged in a pattern providing a coherent context.
 

The visual analytics community has developed an amazing array of tools over the last few years spurred on by national intelligence requirements to analyze a deluge of information on security threats. Many of these tools can be used to create business intelligence out of seemingly chaotic streams of information gathered from a global marketplace and communications network. While the seeds of visual analytics have borne fruit in some areas of business, they seem to have fallen on fallow or at least insufficiently fertile ground in others. Like the wok, these tools need to be presented in a way that appeals to the sensibilities of the prospective user. Links are important in forging lasting relationships. Preparing Risotto alla Genovese in a wok may be the first step in introducing the joys of Cantonese cooking to Italy in the same way that replicating an accountant's spreadsheets, warts and all, in a sophisticated application, may allow the more procedural oriented person to feel more at home in a less familiar technological environment. The problems may be more fundamental than those usually addressed by Human-Computer Interaction studies. Visual analytics by its nature is, well, visual. And, since our education system by and large does not reward visual thinking, the people who might gravitate towards visual tools may be underrepresented in decision making and analytical positions in the business community.

Use.

Standalone charts versus visual context

Why is it important to “think in databases”?
Examples of effective use
Satellite views provide information allowing topography to be displayed.
Global and Spherical
Volume and Mass
Drilling Down

Visual Evolution of the World Bank Atlas

1969		2002
The World Bank began publishing its Atlas of Socioeconomic statistics in the late Sixties. As a college intern under the direction and patient tutelage of Statistician Joseph E. Gholl, I was assigned to hand draw many of the maps for the 1969 edition on graph paper. The process of converting each million dollar unit of GNP into a box on graph paper while trying to maintain some general reference to the physical shape of the country was tedious but illuminating, giving me added appreciation for the functionality and productivity of visualization technology today.		The World Bank Atlas later switched from sizing to coloring countries according to the various measures which removed some of the analytical content of the earlier version, assumed users were not color blind, and required them to perform the extra step of mapping the colors to levels of the indicator being displayed.

GAPMINDER

Benefits to Business

"If we combine new capabilities in information and communications with sensors and satellites, and improved visualization and simulation tools, databases and networks, we will leave our familiar landscapes in the dust." [Bement 2006]