Visual Flying Rules

In my younger days I flew gliders and, until an unfortunate incident that wrecked a hangar and flattened a perimeter fence, small spotter helicopters. Instruments were essential, but most of the useful work (and all of the fun) came under 'visual flying rules'. Rock climbing, walking and scuba diving may seem unconnected, but draw on the same set of hardwired, terrain-related psychomotor skills and perceptions. The whole terrain-related apparatus, part of our evolutionary heritage, is important to understanding any complex data input - physical or conceptual.

Anyone with a particularly strong aptitude in one direction is bound to be a bit odd, and in most mathematicians or statisticians the oddness comes out as a slightly autistic tendency to see patterns, structures or platonic forms where real people see messy existence. We are not usually very good at explaining our view of the world, but we almost invariably try to do it through visual metaphor. When my maths teacher asked how I'd gotten the solutions to a cubic roots problem I muttered that I'd 'watched them grow', which wasn't the answer she wanted. Poets and novelists do it better: Marcus Potter, the brilliant but fragile mathematician of A S Byatt's Frederica Quartet, describes in the final novel[1] how he would "...do mathematical problems by ... seeing a garden ... I used to release the problem into the garden and ... see the answer".

Not all of us are so explicitly or primarily visual as Marcus Potter, but psychovisual interpretation is the most common exploratory device - the intuitive point of access to structures which are only later formalised - and, equally important, the primary means of transmitting complex information onward. Marcus' illustration is one instance of a more general class of terrain metaphors and, by extension, the three-dimensional metaphors of swimming or flight. All involve envisioned transit and manoeuvre through the problem space. In almost every case, visualisation is a vital precursor to data analysis, the prospecting or initial pathfinder reconnaissance stage. It doesn't solve problems, but it provides essential intelligence on the routes, spaces, relationships and fracture lines within a data set, which offer most promise of analytical yield. And, after the analysis is done, a picture is worth a thousand words in bringing back to those at home what we have seen on our travels.

Nowadays, with computerised plotting in fast GUI-driven environments, the underlying forms of such visual tropes don't have to be described or even imagined: their essence can be generated in ever increasing subtlety and sophistication from the comfort and safety of a armchair.

All this has been brought on by arrival on my desk of two new software packages... [more]