Jacques Bertin - Data Quotes

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The author has the reputation of being against color. I am indeed against color when it masks incompetence; when it allows the superimposition of characteristics to the point of absurdity; when people believe it capable of representing ordered data.

Jacques Bertin
[The special properties of visual perception of data]... is the visual means of resolving logical problems.

Jacques Bertin
The problem that still remains to be solved is that of the orderable matrix, that needs the use of imagination... When the two components of a data table are orderable, the normal construction is the orderable matrix. Its permutations show the analogy and the complementary nature that exist between the algorithmic treatments and the graphical treatments.

Jacques Bertin
The use of computers shouldn't ignore the objectives of graphics, that are:
1) Treating data to get information.
2) Communicating, when necessary, the information obtained.

Jacques Bertin
Data is transformed into graphics to understand. A map, a diagram are documents to be interrogated. But understanding means integrating all of the data. In order to do this it's necessary to reduce it to a small number of elementary data. This is the objective of the data treatment be it graphic or mathematic.

Jacques Bertin
And now, at the end of the twentieth century, with the pressure of modern information and the advances of data processing, graphics is passing through a new and fundamental stage. The great difference between the graphic representation of yesterday, which was poorly dissociated from the figurative image, and the graphics of tomorrow, is the disappearance of the congential fixity of the image.

Jacques Bertin
[Overall level questions involved an] understanding of the deep structure of the data being presented in their totality, usually comparing trends and seeing groupings.

Jacques Bertin