Back at UNC, I took a class on information visualization. The subject covers all kinds of interesting questions:

• How do you categorize data before you choose a way to visualize it? (Is it in two dimensions? Three? Is the data nominal? Ordinal? A ratio?)
• What are you trying to see in the data? Extremes? Clusters? Correlations?
• How should you use color? Movement? Texture?
• How do you know if two visualization techniques will combine effectively?
• How the heck many different data sets can you show at once, and still get something meaningful out of it?
• How does the biology of our eyes and brains make some techniques effective, and some worthless?

Part of my fascination with this subject is the unavoidable need to consider biology. The human is always in the loop, and depending on how you use that biological hardware, you can really transmit a lot of information quickly. In some ways, it’s like writing optimized code for a GPU: use the right registers and the right order of operations, and the processing flies. Do it wrong and it plods along like a three-legged turtle.

Anyway, back when I was taking that class I lived in Carrboro, the Siamese twin town of Chapel Hill. Carrboro is a beautiful town which I dearly miss. One of the things I miss most are the dozens of bird species that lived in our neighborhood: goldfinches, robins, woodpeckers, owls, Carolina wrens, towhees….none of which, I might add, do I ever see in stricken, depressing, dirty old Baltimore. But I digress.

I woke up one morning in dear, beautiful Carrboro to the morning chorus. That was a pretty typical thing to wake up to down there, but I must have been up late doing some InfoViz homework assignment because the first conscious thought I had was: “….I can hear at least 4 or 5 different birds quite easily….I bet birds evolved to have perceptively separate songs in audio wave form space!! How else would they be able to find each other in this din?”

And then, of course, I thought, “What the hell am I doing thinking about this at 6:30 in the morning???”

I certainly can’t prove it, but my hypothesis is that evolution exerts pressure on bird calls that keeps them somewhat aurally orthogonal. In other words, I bet bird calls can be combined relatively well to “display” multiple data sets aurally. A nice little touch of biology on the other end of the InfoViz equation.

I’m too lazy and too…not a PhD…to explore this idea further. So if you have a hankerin’, man, run with it. Just let me know how it goes.