The preamble for this chapter starts off with a much-needed (and welcomed) clarification of terms followed by a survey format similar to the last. Drucker wastes no time in solidifying the distinction between the two types of visual forms mentioned in chapter one. These are roughly visual forms as rhetorical assertions vs. knowledge generators.
Relative to the questions raised from my last entry, and regarding her use of loaded terms like "knowledge", this was a particularly important section as I can now decipher much of what left me baffled previously.
With respect to representations and knowledge generators Drucker defines the former as being static to what they visualize while the latter have "combinatoric" qualities. That is, using her example of the train schedule, there are many assertions within a train time table and everyone who experiences the table does so in a different way determined by their needs. She would assert initially that table lends itself to an algorithmic process while suggesting later that a knowledge generator can "perform" the act of reasoning. While I would agree with the former, the later remains unparsable.
Of importance to me is that while perhaps sharing similarities, I (now) would not imagine that she is referring same sort of Knowledge as understood by a philosopher or social scientists. With this context articulated and reasonably defined, the rest largely fell into place.
Again the bulk of this chapter belies a studied historical acumen. Drucker once again organized a trove of (mostly) relevant examples of graphical forms, not only to flesh out the inductive argument from the prior chapter, but to serve as exemplars of positive and negative use cases. For each, she does her best to disambiguate specific types of similar visualizations and contextualize them historically. Each is defined and introspected into for what their "graphical relations" can tell us about the practitioners, their disciplinary roots, how they perceived various units (time, space, administration, etc.), the data they found relevant, and the abstractions their cultures were capable of making.
Towards the end of her review, she starts to consider what I would regard as a more active types of visualization. That is, those which are also physical mechanisms or embodied in a GUI. This is important because she implies that to the degree that any visualization is combinatorially a knowledge generator, it will possess more pursuant complexity.
With this, Drucker begins a summation I both agree with, and am conflicted by in equal measure.
The distinction between data and capta is relevant. I support the idea that everything is relative/co-constitutive, firm belief in the Truth of simple graphical forms needs to be challenged, we rush to visualizations, and (to a degree) richer / more ambiguous data sets could be useful in some cases. To make a simple example, I am skeptical that a handful of x-y graphs should be considered a fair handling of a complex issue like gender pay inequality.
That said, I'm not yet convinced that better graphical forms are the best place to put our efforts. I understand the issues she outlined foremost pedagogical/cultural issues. Before we create new visual forms and ambiguous visualizations, it would be useful if academics would be trained to understand that the forms should be used cautiously and always in a context of healthy skepticism. Transparency can not just be assumed.
As if to support my conclusion she introduces the final example of the cholera map and proposes alternate data sets like the viewpoint of an "elderly man whose son has just died" be added to make it more "expressive". The example comes replete with a mock-up. I really can't tell if she was just trying to be provocative with this prototype. It is unusable to me.
In a real sense, it seems like her example wants to be a crossover of a human-run state machine and an ambiguous data mining tool. My problem here is that both of these tools are still largely the domain of computers for reasons we discussed in class about colors and shapes. Humans don't have such extraordinary visual capacity in these ways. If I remember correctly, we placed the human imposed limit at around six different colors and shapes for each attribute. How would this be any different? This said, "conceiv[ing] of every metric as a factor of x" seems absurd on the face of it.
The truism that there is no technical solution to a social problem seems relevant here. As Drucker herself stated in this chapter, the visual forms we use, imply what we find important and our societal conception of the issue. Don't these precepts need to be challenged effectively for new visual forms, of the sort she is proposing, to be applicable?