Big data is beautiful, vindt datadesigner David MacCandless. Waarom? Omdat je een een datavisualisatie allemaal patronen en verbindingen kunt leggen die je anders niet zou zien en die een vollediger beeld kunnen geven.

So, I’ve been working as a data journalist for about a year, and I keep hearing a phrase all the time, which is this: “Data is the new oil.” Data is the kind of ubiquitous resource that we can shape to provide new innovations and new insights, and it’s all around us, and it can be mined very easily. [..]  it’s a really fertile medium, and it feels like visualizations, infographics, data visualizations, they feel like flowers blooming from this medium. If you look at it directly, it’s just a lot of numbers and disconnected facts. But if you start working with it and playing with it in a certain way, interesting things can appear and different patterns can be revealed.