Data Humanism, the Revolution will be Visualized.

Data is now recognized as one of the founding pillars of our economy, and the notion that the world grows exponentially richer in data every day is already yesterday’s news. Big Data doesn’t belong to a distant dystopian future; it’s a commodity and an intrinsic and iconic feature of our present — like dollars, concrete, automobiles and Helvetica. The ways we relate to data are evolving more rapidly than we realize, and our minds and bodies are naturally adapting to this new hybrid reality built of both physical and informational structures. And visual design — with its power to instantly reach out to places in our subconscious without the mediation of language, and with its inherent ability to convey large amounts of structured and unstructured information across cultures — is going to be even more central to this silent but inevitable revolution. Data visualization pioneers such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Playfair" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">William Playfair</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Snow" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">John Snow</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Nightingale" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Florence Nightingale</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Joseph_Minard" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Charles Joseph Minard</a> were the first to leverage and codify this potential in the 18th and 19th centuries, and modern advocates such as <a href="https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Edward Tufte</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Shneiderman" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Ben Shneiderman</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Heer" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Jeffrey Heer</a> and <a href="http://albertocairo.com/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Alberto Cairo</a> are among those responsible for the renaissance of the field over the last 20 years, supporting the transition of these principles to the world of Big Data. Thanks to this renewed interest, a first wave of data visualization took over the web and reached a broader audience outside the academic environments where it lived until then. But sadly, this wave was ridden by many in a superficial way, as a linguistic shortcut to compensate for the natural vertigo caused by the immeasurable nature of Big Data. <a href="https://medium.com/@giorgialupi/data-humanism-the-revolution-will-be-visualized-31486a30dbfb">Learn More</a>