alt Hacker NewsI think you're reaching. Justifying the answer you want rather than the answer that is.
No, graphs do not need come from text. I've frequently hand generated graphs as my means of recording experimental output. This is a common method when high precision is not needed (because your uncertainty level is the size of your markers). But that's true for graphs in general anyways.
Importantly, graphs are better at conveying the relationship between data, rather than information about a single point. (something something - Poincaré ;)
Besides, plots aren't the only types of graphs. Try network graphs.
Besides, graphs aren't the only visual communication of data.
I'll give you an even more obvious one: CAD. Sure, you can do that in text... but it takes much more room to do and magnitudes more time to interpret. So much so that everyone is going to retranslate it into a picture. Hell, I'll draw on paper before even pulling up the software and that's not uncommon.
> CAD. Sure, you can do that in text... but it takes much more room to do and magnitudes more time to interpret.
Fascinating example for me. I do CAD... using text! My only experience with it is programmatic in openscad. We check the visualization, but only on output of the final product. For me it's dramatically easier to work with. That may be a personal defect but it's also consistent. Underneath the rendering is always data, which is text, markup, but strings of fundamental data.
And in science it's not a stretch at all that numbers come first. I'll argue you're reaching. Today no one is drawing their numbers from experiments directly on a graph. They record them digitally. In textual form typically, and then render them visually to obtain generic understanding. But also there, in the end, your conclusions (per tradition) need to be point estimates with error bounds expressible in concise textual terms. You may obtain them from looking at images but the hard truth is numerical, digital, textual.