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. If we’re going to understand our complex world, one powerful way is to graph it.īut this isn’t the first time we’ve discovered the pleasures of making information into pictures. 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. Sites publish charts showing how the climate is changing, how schools are segregating, how much housework mothers do versus fathers. 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. Now Americans even talk routinely about “purple” states, a mental visualization of political information. America became divided into two colors-data spun into pure metaphor. NBC’s Tim Russert wondered aloud how George Bush would “get those remaining 61 electoral red states, if you will,” and that language became lodged in the popular imagination. What’s more, they talked about those shadings. Bush was so razor close that broadcasters pored over electoral college maps-which they typically colored red and blue. In the 2000 presidential election, the race between Al Gore and George W. As the 2016 election approaches, we’re hearing a lot about “red states” and “blue states.” That idiom has become so ingrained that we’ve almost forgotten where it originally came from: a data visualization.
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