One of her main interests is to work out how to incorporate data visualisation into fiction. I don’t think I’ve found any idea about fiction so exciting since I discovered fiction exists.
Henry Oliver on Helen DeWitt. As a nonvisualizer, I try to avoid data visualization.
@artkavanagh Greetings, fellow nonvisualizer! To me, data visualization and most PowerPoint charts are just a bunch of random shapes and lines and colors.
@MitchW Helen DeWitt sounds like an interesting writer and I’m looking forward to reading some of her work but I hope she doesn’t succeed in finding a way to bring data visualization into fiction. I’ve been thinking of fiction as (among other things, of course) a refuge from charts, maps, graphs and things like that!
@MitchW It does, and they never make sense to me! But real-world maps are more confusing. Actually, I don’t really mind real-world maps, so long as I don’t have to work out and remember where I’m going.
@artkavanagh I was always good with real-world maps. I was a daily newspaper reporter in New Jersey, and got to be a wizard at reading the Hagstrom Atlas. These days I rely on Apple Maps to get to places that I go to multiple times a year (so you'd think I have the route memorized).