Encyclopedia of Aesthetics

Aesthetics, broadly defined as the sensuous perception of material, plays a central role in the emerging practice of data visualization, which aims to render abstract information intelligible to human perception through the use of images and other forms. Contemporary data visualization typically concerns three interrelated areas: data collection, analytics, and visual representation. Data, which refer to the values corresponding to specific qualitative or quantitative measurements of physical or virtual phenomena, are the raw material from which information is generated. Analytics refer to processes or algorithms that operate on a set of raw data to synthesize higher-level information. Data analytics often rely on data models with which hypotheses are tested or decisions or predictions are made. Although data visualizations sometimes map data directly, they often use analytics as an interpretive layer to produce an image. While visualization typically uses images to render concepts or models comprehensible, other techniques, such as sonification and tactile representation, have been explored as well. This essay focuses on the visual as it is the most common form and has played a particularly central role in shaping a new web aesthetic, changing the look and feel of online content. The number of potential visualizations corresponding to a given set of data is limitless, and aesthetic judgments are inevitably involved in the process of creating intelligible and compelling visualizations.