New Paper : Beyond the Walled Garden - a visual essay at IEEE VIS

A visual essay in 5 chapters by Jo Wood.

"Data visualization was tended in a walled garden.”

Yet there was land beyond the trees..."

https://altvis.github.io/#walled-garden

https://vimeo.com/760406142

AI image generation from language prompts has advanced rapidly in little over a year.

It is about to change the way we design data visualization.

This picture essay considers some of the possibilities and the trade-off between the new expressiveness it provides us with and the potential loss of effectiveness that comes with learning new and more complex graphical languages.

It questions whether traditional notions of locatable objects and retinal variables are still applicable in this more sophisticated graphical environment.