Big Data Made Beautiful by Artists
The growth in big data has created new opportunities for artists and designers to use their creativity, information design, and data visualization expertise to communicate trends and results. The growth in big data can be traced to innovations in technology and information accessibility. All areas including art, business, and our living environment are seeing a surge in big data use.
Estimates for data generated each day has reached 2.5 quintillion bytes. There is now more data produced every two days than in all of history prior to 2003. Although the reasons may differ, a shared goal is to further understanding and make improvements.
Big data can be difficult for most people to comprehend. Artists and designers use data visualization to tell a story by providing a visual representation for increased comprehension. Large data sets can easily be misinterpreted, skewed, or presented wrong. These data sets contain noise that obscures the signal and needs to be accounted for. According to information designers, 80% of the work involved in creating an infographic is data-gathering, shaping, and checking. The designers at Information Beautiful describe the shaping of data as making it juicy. Juicy data is the process of getting the data to be tight and comprehensive.
Image: Jer Thorp - Word Frequency
Information is Beautiful
Information is Beautiful is dedicated to distilling the world’s data, information and knowledge into beautiful, interesting and, above all, useful visualizations, infographics and diagrams. They display finished projects on their website and offer data visualization in a series or workshops.
International Number Ones – Data used to show a leading category for each country. International Number Ones displays a leading association for each country that includes United States and spam email, Canada and Facebook addicts, Russia and dashcams, and Switzerland and pop music.
Image: Data Canvas
Data Canvas
Data Canvas is a partnership between Swissnex San Francisco, Gray Area, and the Lift Conference. It started in 2013 as an international online challenge to create innovative visualizations using public transportation data sets. Data Canvas has developed into a media network, online and offline, that promotes public education around civic issues using data. The research around public private initiatives in using data results in events, data visualization challenges, and workshops with partners around the world. Data Canvas, besides being a fun art project, was “also an exercise to show people that working with real-time data is actually difficult,” says Emina Reissinger, of Swissnex San Francisco.
Image: Flowingdata - @HillaryClinton vs. @realDonaldTrump
FlowingData, Data Art
FlowingData is a collection of data visualizations. They have a specific area for artist generated data visualizations named Data Art, finding the beauty in numbers. One of the interesting data visualizations from FlowingData demonstrates the word usage in the Twitter accounts for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. It provides some insight into how they communicated their campaigns on Twitter. I was surprised to see that Hillary Clinton’s account was so focused on Donald Trump and not much else.
Resources:
Blog: https://artonsocial.blogspot.com/
Here’s What Happens When You Let Artists Play With Big Data
This Man Makes Data Look Beautiful
FlowingData - @HillaryClinton vs. @realDonaldTrump