[godelski]

Working in any science should also make this argument clearer. Data as text is hard to read and communicate. Even explanations of results. But graphs? Those are worth a thousand words. They communicate so much so fast. There's also a lot of skill to doing this accurately and well, just as one can say about writing. A whole subfield of computer graphics is dedicated to data visualization because it's so useful. Including things like colors. Things people often ignore because it feels so natural and obvious but actually isn't.

I think it's naïve to claim there's a singular best method to communicate. Text is great, especially since it is asynchronous. But even the OP works off of bad assumptions that are made about verbal language being natural and not being taught. But there's a simple fact, when near another person we strongly prefer to speak than write. And when we can mix modes we like to. There's an art to all this and I think wanting to have a singular mode is more a desire of simplicity than a desire to be optimal

[casey2]

Data that can be visualized is rarely useful. Better to create a language to talk about it.

Often you need a language in the first place to even be interested in the graph at all. Graphs are worth a thousand words if you are willing to throw out any data that

Is higher than 3D

Requires control flow or recursion to explain

Of course you can have diagrams systems that are languages e.g. Feynman Diagrams (a sort of DSL for quickly reading QM math). I would hold this up as a much greater achievement of human ingenuity than r/dataisbeautiful spam. But the differentiation here isn't between text and graphs, but between languages and glyphs.

[inciampati]

It is true that graphs communicate very well. But they do come from text... And in the end we need to be able to describe what we see in them in text.

[godelski]

I think you're reaching. Justifying the answer you want rather than the answer that is.

No, graphs do not need come from text. I've frequently hand generated graphs as my means of recording experimental output. This is a common method when high precision is not needed (because your uncertainty level is the size of your markers). But that's true for graphs in general anyways.

Importantly, graphs are better at conveying the relationship between data, rather than information about a single point. (something something - Poincaré ;)

Besides, plots aren't the only types of graphs. Try network graphs.

Besides, graphs aren't the only visual communication of data.

I'll give you an even more obvious one: CAD. Sure, you can do that in text... but it takes much more room to do and magnitudes more time to interpret. So much so that everyone is going to retranslate it into a picture. Hell, I'll draw on paper before even pulling up the software and that's not uncommon.

[inciampati]

> CAD. Sure, you can do that in text... but it takes much more room to do and magnitudes more time to interpret.

Fascinating example for me. I do CAD... using text! My only experience with it is programmatic in openscad. We check the visualization, but only on output of the final product. For me it's dramatically easier to work with. That may be a personal defect but it's also consistent. Underneath the rendering is always data, which is text, markup, but strings of fundamental data.

And in science it's not a stretch at all that numbers come first. I'll argue you're reaching. Today no one is drawing their numbers from experiments directly on a graph. They record them digitally. In textual form typically, and then render them visually to obtain generic understanding. But also there, in the end, your conclusions (per tradition) need to be point estimates with error bounds expressible in concise textual terms. You may obtain them from looking at images but the hard truth is numerical, digital, textual.

[VorpalWay]

I have tried OpenSCAD, but found it extremely limited and awkward. I much prefer parametric CAD like Fusion 360, OnShape (which I'm currently using) or FreeCAD (which has a really bad UX). And my day job is as a C++/Rust developer, so you would think that I would have good chances to prefer a textual representation.

Part of this might be OpenSCAD specifically. It is CSG based, which is really not ideal, making it hard to add things like chamfers and fillets to your model. Most OpenSCAD models I come across for 3D printing have a crude look probably because this is so hard.

But part of it is just that text for most people just isn't the right representation in this case. (If you look at the relative usage of parametric CAD to textual CAD on sites for 3D models you will see that I'm right. Also, look at what approach commercial packages offer.)

[CasperH2O]

You may want to have a look at build123d. Its a Python library with an active and accessible community.

[tremon]

I do CAD... using text! My only experience with it is programmatic in openscad

That does not mean that the CAD drawing itself is text. It is an artifact, produced from text. Using your argument you could just as easily argue that all computer code is text, and I don't think that's a useful redefinition of the word "text".

[godelski]

I'm absolutely fascinated by your answer!

Can you tell me more about the pipeline? Are you really starting from scratch by programming? You don't do any sketching first? I'm really having a hard time imagining doing anything reasonably complicated with this method. I'll admit that there are some advantages like guaranteeing bounds but there's so much that seems actually harder to do that way.

  > They record them digitally

Like I said, it is contextually dependent. If you're recording with digital equipment to a computer, then yeah, it's just easier to record that way and dump into a plot. But if you don't have that then no. And again, even recording by hand it is still dependent.

But some data is naturally image data (pictures?). Some data is naturally in other modalities (chemical reactions? Smell? Texture? Taste?). Yes, with digital recording equipment you can argue that this is all text but at that point I'd argue you're being facetious as everything is text by that definition.

  > You may obtain them from looking at images but the hard truth is numerical, digital, textual.
 

Here I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding and are likely limiting yourself based on your experience.

First off, not every measuring device is digital. So just that alone makes it down right false. And pretending all measurements are digital is just deceptive or naive.

Second, and I cannot stress this enough: *every single measurement is a proxy* to the thing you intend to measure.

You can't even measure a damn meter directly. You can measure distance through reference length that is an approximation of a standard distance (aka a ruler). You can measure distance through reference to an approximation of time and through the use of some known velocity, such as the speed of light through a given medium (approximating time, approximating c in the medium, approximating the medium). And so on.

What you cannot do is measure a meter directly.

And most of the things we're trying to measure, model, and approximate in modern science are far more abstract than a standard unit!

The idea that the ground truth is textual is ridiculous. That would only be true on the condition that the universe itself is running on a digital computer. Despite the universe being able to do computation, I see little reason to believe it is digital.

[tsimionescu]

No, you do not need to, and will not generally be able to, describe everything that a graph conveys in text. Graphs can give you an intuitive understanding of the data that text would not be able to, simply by virtue of using other parts of the brain and requiring less short term memory. If a graph can be replaced with 5 pages of text, that doesn't mean that you get the same information from both - you're likely much more able to keep one image in your short term memory than 5 pages of text.

[godelski]

A word is worth a thousand images. Wait...

[inciampati]

But a graph, which provides a view at a certain level of resolution, can often be described in a few consise statements. That's why we make them, to get a view we can condense.

[tsimionescu]

No, if we can condense something in a few short statements, we don't generally bother making a graph. We exactly make graphs when something is not easily explained in words, but instead requires visualization.

Of course, not all graphs are equally information dense, and some are only used for decorative purposes more than actually conveying information. But in the general case, and especially when used well, graphs convey much more information at a glance than a short text description could.

[smj-edison]

I feel like it's more that we have statements that are "pointers" to the graph. "According to Figure 1, we see that temperature rises do to pressure." So we can summarise with words, but the intuition and proof comes from the visual medium.

[PopAlongKid]

Many years ago, in college, I used to volunteer for Recording For The Blind, reading various math texts aloud. I had to verbally describe every illustration in the textbook, including graphs, using a few concise statements. Not perfect, but possible.

[tsimionescu]

You can describe any graph to some low level of detail, sure. But does it actually help anyone? Do people with complete blindness, for example, gain anything from hearing a description of the graph of f(x) = x as "a straight line at a 45° angle crossing the graph at 0", compared to what seeing people gain from viewing that graph?

[smj-edison]

But they are multiple different "views" into data, and I would posit that a textual view of data is no different than a graphical view, no? If you import data from a parquet file, you go straight from numbers to graphs, so I disagree that it comes from text. Both graphs and text come from information. Circles on surveys, Arduino temperature readings, counter clickers when doing surveys. Those are not just text.