Florian Windhager gave the first official lecture of the 3DH series on the subject of Visualization Paradigms. The lecture aimed to give us an overview of the field of information visualization and ran through a number of helpful distinctions.
He started with the simple story of visualization. We have the world, we do observations, these are ordered and then represented by science. We can represent in different ways, with language (text) or with symbolic representations (math) or with pictorial/iconic representations. Some of the common pictorial representations include maps and diagrams.