Visual Strategies, A Practical Guide to Graphics for Scientists & Engineers

摘要

One difficult aspect of working with graphics is to talk about them without using their own terms in imprecise ways. So much of our linguistic practice relies on the basic metaphor (in a Lakoff and Johnson sense) of seeing, that it's hard to avoid using terms like "aspect" loosely-such as I did in the first sentence of this review-when they have more precise meanings in visual studies. So when discussing graphics it's best to avoid terms like "see," "viewpoint," "view," "look," "show," "vision," "perceive," "perception," "perspective," "standpoint," "oversight," "outlook," "observation," "guise," "appear," "point of view," "insight," "revision," "side," "angle," and "point," unless we take some thought about what these words might mean in the specific domain of graphics and what ambiguities we may be subjecting readers to when we use these terms imprecisely-for example, using "see" to mean understand, "perspective" to mean opinion, "observation" to mean idea, and so forth.