Jacques Bertin

"Graphic representation constitutes one of the basic sign-systems conceived by the human mind for the purposes of storing, understanding, and communicating essential information. As a "language" for the eye, graphics benefits from the ubiquitous properties of visual perception. As a monosemic system, it forms the rational part of the world of images."

"To analyse graphic representation precisely, it is helpful to distinguish it from musical, verbal and mathematical notations, all of which are perceived in a linear or temporal sequence. The graphic image also differs from figurative representation essentially polysemic, and from the animated image, governed by the laws of cinematographic time. Within the boundaries of graphics fall the fields of networks, diagrams and maps. The domain of graphic imagery ranges from the depiction of atomic structures to the representation of galaxies and extends into the spheres of topography and cartography."

"Graphics owes its special significance to its double function as a storage mechanism and a research instrument."

"And now, at the end of the twentieth century, with the pressure of modern information and the advances of data processing, graphics is passing through a new and fundamental stage. The great difference between the graphic representation of yesterday, which was poorly dissociated from the figurative image, and the graphics of tomorrow, is the disappearance of the congential fixity of the image."

"There are as many types of questions as components in the information."

"Information is the reply to a question."

"[Overall level questions involved an] understanding of the deep structure of the data being presented in their totality, usually comparing trends and seeing groupings."

"The plane is the mainstay of all graphic representation. It is so familiar that its properties seem self-evident, but the most familiar things are often the most poorly understood. The plane is homogeneous and has two dimensions. The visual consequences of these properties must be fully explored."

"When the correspondences on the plane can be established between:"

"When the correspondences on the plane can be established among all the divisions of the same component, the construction is a network."

"[Bertin's 'color' refers to] the repertoire of colored sensations which can be produced at equal value."

"Value perception dominates color perception."

"If, in order to obtain a correct and complete answer to a given question, all other things being equal, one construction requires a shorter observation time than another construction, we can say that it is more efficient for this question."

"The aim of the graphic is to make the relationship among previously defined sets appear."

"A graphic is a diagram when correspondences on the plane can be established among all elements of another component."

"A graphic is not 'drawn' once and for all; it is 'constructed' and reconstructed until it reveals all the relationships constituted by the interplay of the data.... A graphic is never an end in itself; it is a moment in the process of decision-making."

"[The special properties of visual perception of data]... is the visual means of resolving logical problems."

"As with any graphic, networks are used in order to discover pertinent troups of to inform others of the groups and structures discovered. It is a good means of displaying structures, However, it ceases to be a means of discovery when the elements are numerous. The figure rapidly becomes complex, illegible and untransformable."

"The author has the reputation of being against color. I am indeed against color when it masks incompetence; when it allows the superimposition of characteristics to the point of absurdity; when people believe it capable of representing ordered data."

"The use of computers shouldn’t ignore the objectives of graphics, that are:"

"The problem that still remains to be solved is that of the orderable matrix, that needs the use of imagination... When the two components of a data table are orderable, the normal construction is the orderable matrix. Its permutations show the analogy and the complementary nature that exist between the algorithmic treatments and the graphical treatments."

"Data is transformed into graphics to understand. A map, a diagram are documents to be interrogated. But understanding means integrating all of the data. In order to do this it’s necessary to reduce it to a small number of elementary data. This is the objective of the “data treatment” be it graphic or mathematic."

"His books Semiology of Graphics and Graphics and Graphic Information Processing have been stimuli for my own thinking about the representation and analysis of geographic information. I have also used both books as core readings for graduate seminars and they have generated lively discussion and prompted innovative research. I often ask graduate students to consider how cartographic research and practice in the U.S. might be different today if the English edition of Semiology of Graphics had appeared in 1967 (when it was published in French), rather than in 1983. I know that my own work would have been dramatically different if I had encountered these ideas a decade and a half sooner."

"Although his work was very original, it is typical of the 50s to 70s. He was not the only one to analyze images. Roland Barthes has worked on advertisements, Pierre Bourdieu on photography... His work can be considered as a typical structuralist analysis, because he focuses on the relationship between elements of graphics, and not on the elements themselves. And it is a very modern work, which proclaims that graphics are not static. Graphic mobility is a way of processing information, as all those who have used Bertin's matrices have noticed. His heritage goes far beyond Geography and has been very useful in visual data analysis."

"While the early days of visualization go back over 200 years, actual research to understand how it works really only started in the 1960s. Jacques Bertin’s Sémiologie Graphique (Semiology of Graphics), published in 1969, was the first systematic treatment of the different ways graphical representations encode data. Bertin coined many terms of the trade, such as the mark, which is the basic unit of every visualization, like a bar, line, or circle sector. He also defined a number of retinal variables, which are the visual properties we use to express the data; these include color, size, location, etc."