Post 20- Transforming data into human stories

Erik Spiekermann's review of the book The Transformer: The Principles of Making Isotype Charts in Eye magazine makes some pretty pertinent points about the process of encoding data in graphics. The subject of the book he reviews is Otto Neurath's work in developing a style of data presentation which maintained the connection between the actual data being shown and the visual. The principles of Neurath's Isotype charts advocate the tailoring of the visual to the data it is representing to create a piece which can be understood as intuitively as possible. 

Neurath developed the notion of ‘the transformer’, as Robin Kinross writes in his preface, ‘to describe the process of analysing, selecting, ordering, and then making visual some information, data, ideas, implications’.

A crucial difference between my visual system and infographics is that the symbols are not intended to be transcriptions of the absolute music data which you could read a key to understand, rather they are a visual language for comparison and observation to be understood in relation only to one another. 


The arbitrary nature of languages means that the symbols created by my system could take nearly any form, as long as they make differences apparent. 


However, to give the user of the system some clues as to what is being signified in specific differences I will firstly draw on existing visual language and, more importantly, give them some reference points for translation in the form of well-known songs visualised through the system in the contexts in which my symbols will appear.