Visual Thinking & Graphic Discoveries

This article started out as an addendum to a chapter in our book, Data Visualization: A History of Visual Thinking and Graphic Communication (Friendly & Wainer, 2020). In this we claimed that much of the history of data visualization could be seen as combination of three forces: (1) important scientific problems of the day, (2) a developing abundance of data, and (3) the cognitive ability of some heroes in this history to conceive solutions to problems by visual imagination. In the book and what follows we make frequent reference to cognitive aspects of the visual understanding of phenomena and their expression in graphic displays: "inner vision", "graphic communication", "visual insight" are some of the terms we use. An early metaphor for this and an early title for our book was "A gleam in the mind's eye." We give some additional explanations and examples here. We also want to place this topic in a wider framework.