“The principal disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with
reality,” as writer Alan Watts observes. One can easily get lost in the world
of digital media, making it difficult to imagine information that is not sym-
bolically encoded in words, pixels, or bytes. And yet the material origins and
manifestations of data matter. Without considering them, a fabricated data
set may be indistinguishable from an authentic one. As public discourse is
full of controversies around facts and counterfacts, the gaps between data
and the world become increasingly troubling. These controversies often
revolve around how data were generated and facts were established—something that traditional visualization methods don’t account for. Even in
less contested situations, reconciling a statistical model with personal expe-
rience is difficult. This is where some of the greatest challenges lie.
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