Jul 8, 2016 07:31 PM
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/su...180959563/
EXCERPT: [...] We live in an age of data visualization. Go to any news website and you’ll see graphics charting support for the presidential candidates; open your iPhone and the Health app will generate personalized graphs showing how active you’ve been this week, month or year. Sites publish charts showing how the climate is changing, how schools are segregating, how much housework mothers do versus fathers. And newspapers are increasingly finding that readers love “dataviz”: In 2013, the New York Times’ most-read story for the entire year was a visualization of regional accents across the United States. It makes sense. We live in an age of Big Data. If we’re going to understand our complex world, one powerful way is to graph it.
But this isn’t the first time we’ve discovered the pleasures of making information into pictures. Over a hundred years ago, scientists and thinkers found themselves drowning in their own flood of data—and to help understand it, they invented the very idea of infographics. The idea of visualizing data is old: After all, that’s what a map is—a representation of geographic information—and we’ve had maps for about 8,000 years. But it was rare to graph anything other than geography [...extensive history covered...]
[...] The age of data, it seems, has even created a new job: the data journalist, who’s comfortable not only making phone calls and writing stories, but writing code and crunching data. [...] “It didn’t used to be even ten years ago that we could build a sophisticated data analysis at the same speed that someone can write a story,” says Scott Klein, a data journalist with ProPublica. “And now we can.” News outlets now often publish entire databases with a search interface, because readers enjoy poking around in the big river of data themselves.
“We can rely on a level of data literacy that we couldn’t rely on 100 years ago, or even 40 years ago,” Klein adds. Everyday people have tools to chart the info of their lives. Google, for example, recently upgraded its online spreadsheets application so that its users can automatically generate visualizations from any data they put inside.
The next step? Virtual reality. Alberto Cairo [...] imagines putting on a VR headset to read a report or watch TV, and watching visualizations swim around in front of him in 3-D. “How can you superimpose a data image over a real image?” he wonders. That’ll be the question for the William Playfairs of this century....
EXCERPT: [...] We live in an age of data visualization. Go to any news website and you’ll see graphics charting support for the presidential candidates; open your iPhone and the Health app will generate personalized graphs showing how active you’ve been this week, month or year. Sites publish charts showing how the climate is changing, how schools are segregating, how much housework mothers do versus fathers. And newspapers are increasingly finding that readers love “dataviz”: In 2013, the New York Times’ most-read story for the entire year was a visualization of regional accents across the United States. It makes sense. We live in an age of Big Data. If we’re going to understand our complex world, one powerful way is to graph it.
But this isn’t the first time we’ve discovered the pleasures of making information into pictures. Over a hundred years ago, scientists and thinkers found themselves drowning in their own flood of data—and to help understand it, they invented the very idea of infographics. The idea of visualizing data is old: After all, that’s what a map is—a representation of geographic information—and we’ve had maps for about 8,000 years. But it was rare to graph anything other than geography [...extensive history covered...]
[...] The age of data, it seems, has even created a new job: the data journalist, who’s comfortable not only making phone calls and writing stories, but writing code and crunching data. [...] “It didn’t used to be even ten years ago that we could build a sophisticated data analysis at the same speed that someone can write a story,” says Scott Klein, a data journalist with ProPublica. “And now we can.” News outlets now often publish entire databases with a search interface, because readers enjoy poking around in the big river of data themselves.
“We can rely on a level of data literacy that we couldn’t rely on 100 years ago, or even 40 years ago,” Klein adds. Everyday people have tools to chart the info of their lives. Google, for example, recently upgraded its online spreadsheets application so that its users can automatically generate visualizations from any data they put inside.
The next step? Virtual reality. Alberto Cairo [...] imagines putting on a VR headset to read a report or watch TV, and watching visualizations swim around in front of him in 3-D. “How can you superimpose a data image over a real image?” he wonders. That’ll be the question for the William Playfairs of this century....
