originally published here

Data visualization sounds pretty dry. Mundane, technical, the stuff of economists and accountants. But that’s changed. Data is more accessible than ever. The US Federal government is releasing and publishing data in usable digital forms in an unprecedented fashion, the City of Vancouver and other municipalities around the world are doing the same. The keepers of the data are challenging constituents to do something with it. And the challenge has been taken up by many.

This week the specialist in the field of data visualization have gathered in Madrid for the 3rd annual Visualizer conference. With the goal of new ways to make data public and offer new tools to make this data meaningful.

Here’s a good look at some of the presentations at the conference from Information Aesthetic, one of the best blogs on the topic.

But the point here goes beyond a new trend and a powerful source of civic awareness. It’s about creating meaning, emotion, in a new way. In a way made possible by technology by a new medium. For example, a recent project by digital artist Todd Vanderlin, examines usage of the Boston Subway system.

Or another very well known project is Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns. Here Koblin took FAA data about flight routes over the US and visualized the patterns of movement over the course of a day. Again, using the most mundane information he created an emotive, informative, and compelling work.

Vancouver is home to one of the pioneers in the field, Jer Thorp. Jer, known by his online meme blprnt, is one of the masters at taking everyday things and building works of art out of them. A most compelling work in its conceptual simplicty and engaging aesthetic is GoodMorning. In it, Thorp visualizes entries from Twitter that contain the phrase “Good morning”. With this information he documents the evolution of a day in the Twitterverse using this simple data source.

In all these examples the creators, the artists, are taking very utilitarian subject matter which necessarilly compelling nor emotive and infusing it with new layers of expression. But with the data in the hands of an artist using tools like Processing and OpenFrameworks which make data visualization simple subway usage stats suddenly becomes fascinating.This is the power of art. Since the Cave of Altamira humans have been compelled to capture the everyday. To find meaning in the mundane, peel back the layers of routine, expresses the human spirit.

And that’s what we are witnessing here. Analyzing the archives of day to day human activity through an artistic lens changes the conversation. We can look at subway data or flight paths or when people say good morning on Twitter in a way that says more than the data alone. That’s the power and the beauty of art in a digital age, massive amounts of everyday information can be transformed into elegant works of art.

A great refernece for anyone looking to get started down the path of data visualization is Ben Fry’s book Visualizing Data. Fry is one of the creators of the programming language Processing. A programming environment I’ve been using for the past year.