As mentioned before, I’ve been pretty insanely busy, trying to get four different co-authored research papers ready in time for the submission deadline next week for one of the major conferences in my field. Part of the reason I’m busy is that I procrastinate, but part of it is that I’m damnedly slow. And an important part of that is that I spend roughly forever making and fiddling with graphs.
See, I just love a good graph. One of my great goals in life is to give a standard length (20-30 minute) conference talk where my entire collection of slides is just one gorgeous, illuminating, data rich graph. The graph would need to have all the information I want to convey and enough to support 20 minutes of me talking about it. So far I’ve not come anywhere close. I’ve occasionally had single graphs that could support more than five minutes of presentation, but I’m not sure I’ve ever hit 10. But I’m working on it.
In the meantime, I tend to collect vast whale bellies full of data (my research generates data with wild abandon), and then make plot after plot after plot, trying to figure out both what the data says, and how I can best share that with my potential audience. Hours and hours constructing different views on the mystery. And, of course, I don’t then leave them alone. No, I fiddle and twist, spindle and mutilate, trying to get it “right”.
Technical papers come with page limits, however, so many of these graphs wander around for a while through the land of drafts, only to have their ultimate fate be the rubbish bin of ruthless editing. Some I really like, but they lose out to the necessities of the day. Others were probably never destined for greatness, but served some purpose, like an intellectual scaffolding that helped me build my understanding and argument, but was always going to come down when the construction was finished.
This image combines three of those pieces of scaffolding, freed of their labels and tickmarks, but together as team. I knew all along that these weren’t gonna make the big time, but I needed to plot them to make sure that my intuition about them was (mostly) correct. It was, they served their purpose, and now they’re off to oblivion. Except that I just liked the way these looked, so I joined them all up like little Legos to preserve here on Flickr.
You can think of it as a curvy Mondrian, without being nearly as good :-).
Tags:
Art,
graphic design,
graphics,
Research,
Sabbatical,
Science,
Writing
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