In each of our heads lies a machine whose R&D time must be measured in millennia, has a parts count in the hundreds of billions, and a wiring scheme containing a quarter of a quadrillion connections. Through a degree of parallelism seen few other places in nature, the brain is able to process huge amounts of sensory information in real time and without our having to expend any mental effort. Yet the irony of our conscious experience is the linear character our thoughts take on when we express ourselves using words. 

Despite the primacy of language in constructing ideas and models of the world around us, there are places where our parallel nature peeks through and this seriality of thought is exposed for the façade that it is. Perhaps the most vivid is the ability of our visual system to process diagrams containing hundreds of data points in a single glance and immediately see patterns that would elude us when confronted with an equivalent table of figures. Finding ways to map abstract quantitative information into a form that takes advantage of the brain’s parallelism is the fundamental challenge of information design.

Pattern Recognition is a response to both the near magic of this capability and the increasing necessity of making use of it as the amount of data in and about our world grows at ever accelerating rates. To that end, data is both the subject of my investigation and the raw material for the experiments within. Though my principal concern is communicating the information within a dataset to the viewer, it is impossible to divorce this aim from formal concerns. After all, in a diagram the form is the information.

Thus the work that follows is split between two goals. The first is to represent data in such a way that its internal structure reveals itself visually, providing insights that could not be gleaned through textual analysis. The other is to investigate the formal qualities of these computationally generated, ‘found’ patterns.

The choice of subject matter is intentionally far-ranging, including Google’s HTML coding habits, the syntax of a finch’s song, and the harmonic relationships in a Bach fugue. But in all these cases there are systematic relationships between the parts of these wholes which visualization is uniquely positioned to depict – and much beauty hiding in the spaces between the tags, syllables, and notes.

“Critics are the owls of Minerva, flying around at dusk.”

“We have a blueprint for a state machine that writes a blueprint for another state machine. So we are looking at a blueprint of a state machine that makes blueprints and we are trying to predict the behaviour of the state machines it builds.

This is roughly like looking at Bach’s DNA and hearing the Little Fugue in your head.”

“This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

“The way SICP looks at things, a procedure is a dead thing, a list of instructions for the computer to execute. A process is the magic that happens when a procedure is run. A procedure “evolves” a process in the sense that the static content of the procedure causes the dynamic things in the process to happen.”

“Photographs turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.”

“Supermarkets and shoe stores often go into new buildings; good bookstores and antique dealers seldom do.”

“Where did these three battles occur? In a park and in the park-like grounds of the project. After outbreaks of this kind, one of the remedies invariably called for is more parks and playgrounds. We are bemused by the sound of symbols.”

“The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so.”