Hacker News Reader

Comment by GuiA | Hacker News Reader

I agree that text is undervalued in our current media happy era; I say this as someone who uses terminal applications as much as possible (email, twitter, accounting, programming, etc. - I secretly pray for a return of the text only internet)

On the other hand, there are things that pictures can convey in ways that plain text couldn't approximate.

To link to a famous example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Minard.png

Just looking at this, in half a minute or so, you get a pretty good idea of the quantities involved, how they evolved over time, how they are linked together, etc. Conveying the same information with pure text would be much more lengthy.

I'm not going to make an entire case for this right here - just read Edward Tufte's books if you aren't too familiar with those ideas.

View on HN

I'm a huge fan of Tufte, but even he would probably concede that quite a bit of text is needed to explain the nuances and details of the Minard graphic. I mean, hell, I sat through one of his day-long seminars and the part about Minard was not short.

In any case, the OP wouldn't disagree with you...there are things for which imagery beats text (notably, maps)...but otherwise, use text. And still, you can get pretty far with just a textual description. And even for imagery, text is still an essential component for conveying information...Try going through a gallery of World Press Photo winners without reading any of the captions, for example.

> there are things for which imagery beats text (notably, maps)

You are at the southern edge of a great cavern. To the south across a shallow ford is a dark tunnel which looks like it was once enlarged and smoothed. To the north a narrow path winds among stalagmites. Dim light illuminates the cavern.

> go south

You have moved into a dark place. It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Even here graphics can help. You're probably familiar with this: http://almy.us/image/dungeon.jpg Drawing maps - visualizing what is conveyed in text in other ways in general - can be rewarding and useful.

I agree, the wikipedia example is especially strained, sure you can not represent that sentence clearly in picture, but can you represent Mona Lisa or Beethoven's 5th in text? Different types of representations are used for different things, sometimes they overlap and one is more efficient than the other and yes text has been pretty useful.

I'd argue that the moment we're not trying to convey emotional impact, but instead, raw information, text wins even in those cases.

Text is a very compact digital form, which is excellent for copying, splicing, recombining, algorithmic parsing, etc. Our computers are essentially, even in the case of MP3 or JPEG formats, storing it as a textual string and only at the very end, converting it back to images or sound.

The primary uses for non-string/text based formats (and encoding schemes related to those) is when we're trying to get our (or others') brains to react in a particular emotional manner, for which it obviously makes sense to poke the right buttons.

> can you represent Mona Lisa or Beethoven's 5th in text

It was first created in text :)

How many people could fully experience Beethoven's 5th by reading the sheet music, assuming they've never heard it before?

For musically gifted people who read sheet music every day, I have heard that they start to hear scores in their head while reading them, and that it's not so different than reading words. So in the case of classical music, the comparison to text is quite applicable. Shakespeare is almost unintelligible to me until I see it performed. I see no difference between this and a textually encoded symphony.

> 39. Re graphics: A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.

http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com