All visualizations are actually cultural artifacts. Saying that a scatter plot or a Treemap is cultural however is not particularly meaningful or resonating to members within the western culture. Our thoughts are so significantly influenced and structured by the culture we are immersed in, that culture is transparent and sometimes trivial to us.

Cultural aspects of visualizations only become apparent when we look at designs and usages of visualizations from an exotic setting. I recently came across a very interesting visualization in the traditional Chinese culture (in my hometown we never actually used it). Literally, it is a time-series visualization that shows the diminution of freezing days - 九九消寒图 .

In the Chinese calendar, starting at winter solstice, the season of winter consists of 81 days (i.e. there are nine 9-day periods). Nobody likes freezing weather, and Chinese people’s yearnings for the winter to go away resulted in a custom called “counting the nines” (数九) . This custom can be traced back to 550 A.D. (梁朝宗懔所著《荆楚岁时记》，书中有“俗用冬至日数及 九九八十一日，为寒尽”之句。) Keeping track of how many days of winter have passed is not trivial cognitive work: it spans three months! External structures are needed. Counting using the calendar is of course one way of doing this. Can we be more creative then? Here is one idea: choose a line of poetry consisting of 9 characters representing the 9 periods, and each character consisting of 9 strokes, representing the 9 days in each period. An example is shown below (the poetry translated means “the weeping willow in front of the pavilion, please take care and wait for the spring’s breeze”). The strokes are not filled, indicating the winter has not started. As days pass by, fill in the strokes. After 81 days, the poetry is completed and spring is coming!

Based on this idea, many variants of the visualizations were developed. People began to use the visualization to record information about the weather on each day and even interesting things happened. Like the figure shown below, after 81 days, the visualization becomes a diary too, recording notable events in the winter.

If these are not “proper visualizations”, the following variants may come closer. In the figure below, we have a 9 by 9 grid. As days go by, we fill in each grid cell a small Taiji. The orientation of the Taiji represents the weather condition on that day.

Here’s another one, neither in the form of text nor abstract visualizations, but a painting of plum blossom. The painting starts off with merely trunks and branches, no flowers. Each day goes by, paint a blossom representing that day (or if you will, paint a red dot). At the end of the winter, an art piece is created.

These visualizations are very interesting even though they only represent simple information such as time and weather. They show how visualizations are inherently cultural products, and their creations are so inseparable from other aspects of culture: language, custom, religion, art and even culturally prominent flora. Another interesting note is that the flexibility of creating and modifying a visualization is important even for simple tasks such as day counting (it is human-visualization interaction, isn’t it!). In modern times, this may be done by computers; but we should not forget about the importance of incorporating human in this loop as well.