2019 Was the Year Data Visualization Hit the Mainstream
By: Elijah Meeks
Tags: Data Visualization, Design, Data Humanism, Data, Dvsintro

2019 Was the Year Data Visualization Hit the Mainstream

From our president to our clothes to our books, this year showed that Dataviz has become an integral part of modern culture

There’s always something going on in the field of data visualization but until recently it was only something that people in the field noticed. To the outside world, beyond perhaps an occasional Amazing Map®, Tufte workshop or funny pie chart, these trends are invisible. Not so in 2019, where data visualization featured prominently in major news stories and key players in the field created work that didn’t just do well on Dataviz Twitter but all over.

2019 saw the United States President amend a data visualization product with a sharpie. That should have been enough to make 2019 special, but the year also saw the introduction of a data visualization-focused fashion line, a touching book that uses data visualization to express some of the anxieties and feelings we all struggle with, as well as the creation of the first holistic professional society focused on data visualization.

The First Data Visualization President

Illustration by Surasti Puri

When Donald Trump was elected, he framed and hung in the White House a map of the United States that implied he was elected by an enormous landslide. But as every frustrated data visualization expert pointed out, this map neglected to indicate that more people didn’t vote for Trump than did. The United States has had data-driven presidents before — Thomas Jefferson famously charted the crops the slaves of his plantation planted every year. But the United States has never had a president that cared more about the appearance of data than the data itself, until now.

The difference between Thomas Jefferson (the first data scientist president) and Donald Trump (the first data visualization president) is that Jefferson wanted to understand the data and used data visualization to do so whereas Trump was more concerned with the representation of the data.

The critical thing to recognize is that it was the rhetorical value of the above geospatial data visualization and not its underlying dataset that was important to Trump. But it wasn’t the electoral map that cemented Donald Trump’s status as the first data visualization president because, critically, the map was representing the data (it was just doing so in a way that was misleading). It was this year in September when, confronted with an official map of the range of the effects of Hurricane Dorian — one that contradicted his claims about what states might be affected — he decided to draw onto the map an additional bit of range. The data didn’t support it and wasn’t even uncertain enough to allow it to be drawn with digital tools, but Trump knew if he could just change the visualization, that was all that mattered.

This has been taken by many pundits as a sign that we live in a post-fact era but that’s short-sighted. Instead, public debates about the presentation of data increase the prominence of data visualization as a meaningful act. The previous way of looking at it, that you were just “showing the data” is naive and misleading and leads to products like Trump’s “Impeach This” map. The naive perspective that data visualization is just a final step to help people see the data ignores the importance of subtle steps like showing uncertainty as well as the necessity to design a product that engages the audience (something Trump does far better than many data visualization practitioners).

Trump is a sign of this, not a cause, and as we move forward in our practice we need to be more aware of how, for many people, the visualization is the data.

Reflective Data Visualization

Illustration by Surasti Puri

Just as there have been presidents before Trump who have shown charts, there have been books before Michelle Rial’s Am I Overthinking This that are filled with charts. But Michelle’s book, unlike the typical data visualization coffee table book, is not a collection of charts selected for their historical or design merits. Instead, she’s created a series of charts by hand in her inimitable style that highlights the contradictions, fears, and complexities of modern life in a way that text simply can’t.

Michelle’s book is filled with playful charts like these that represent weighty subjects in an amusing but still analytical manner.

Data visualization as a way of exploring and expressing one’s feelings and traits has always been present in the margins of the field. Data-driven badges are always popular and Dear Data provided a nice model for thinking about one’s life and connecting with each other in a systematic way. Likewise, XKCD has often produced data visualization content. The Internet is littered with jokes like the pie chart made of a real pie, which have always proved popular with audiences. But Michelle’s book signals a fundamental shift toward the act of creating data visualization as a standalone way of imputing meaning, not as a gimmick or a one-off but fully engaged as the primary method for dealing with an increasingly data-intruded life.

That’s probably why Michelle’s work is constantly shared without credit.

The Unstoppable Giorgia Lupi

Illustration by Surasti Puri

Our profession suffers from an implicit stratification that bubbles up into a disdain for those who use one method of doing data visualization over the other. Practitioners who use one tool think those who use another aren’t as good. Coders think people who rely on tools are less capable. People who write in one language or with one library think the others are worse. As a result, we see an overemphasis on learning technical skills over design.

Except for Giorgia Lupi, who has throughout her career eschewed this entire line of reasoning to forge a path that touches on traditional data visualization, data art, design and data humanism. This year, Giorgia has tacked on two more significant achievements: She’s started a fashion line and joined Pentagram, the world’s largest independent design consultancy.