Looking Forward: What About Animation?

This discussion has focused on using static graphics in general, and color in particular, as a means of visualizing multivariate data. I've purposely neglected one very powerful dimension: time. The ability to animate graphics multiplies by several orders of magnitude the amount of information that can be packed into a visualization (a stunning example is Aaron Koblin's visualizations of U.S. and Canadian flight patterns, explored in Chapter 6). But packing that information into a time-varying data structure involves considerable effort, and animating data in a way that is informative, not simply aesthetically pleasing, remains challenging. Canonical forms of animated visualizations (equivalent to the histograms, box plots, and scatterplots of the static world) are still a ways off, but frameworks like Processing^[28] are a promising start toward their development.