Humans are visual beings (do you need proof?). Also, we can experience in our everyday life a variety of cognitive biases. An example? Clustering illusion makes us see trends and patterns that a quantitative analysis would not detect. In the so-called era of complexity, these two facts can impair our capability for understanding data representations without being fooled by ourselves. This is why projects like visual complexity by Manuel Lima are taking science to the people for real. As in in the web page by the author, the project “intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web“. Learning how to digest such representations of knowledge with the aid of human-oriented preprocessing is, in my opinion, a fundamental step for building a human culture of complexity. Enjoy visiting the gallery of the projects by the different authors. And beware: beauty is all around in there.
Roberta Bardini