I recently came across an article in Scientific American titled "The Data-Visualization Revolution" by Hidalgo and Almossawi (you can read the full article here). The article proposes that our new abilities to visualize data are as historically significant as Galileo's first Jupiter observations by telescope.
We definitely live in a time where data is more pervasive and increasingly used to justify decisions. However, I think that we still have a long ways to go in ensuring that we not only use data to make our decisions, but that a dataset's nuances and implications are well understood before we make a certain decision. Making a decision that is data informed is about more than simply calculating means, fitting trend lines, and observing past time series. Data visualization offers us a unique opportunity to go beyond simple summary statistics and play with the underlying data, dynamically reducing the number of dimensions available to us or perceiving trends that could not be perceived through numerical displays.
Hidalgo and Almossawi state that the increasing amount of publicly available data, in combination with our ability to dynamically visualize this data, is a true game changer. As a data practitioner, I am in agreement and believe that the intersection of these two factors will push us closer to decision making that is truly driven by a thorough understanding of complex datasets.
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