Stone Soup, Anyone?
How “data” became the hidden ingredient propping up digital art
There is an old folktale people tell their children. It’s called “Stone Soup.” It has many variants, but it goes roughly like this: A beggar arrives in a wealthy village and knocks on doors to ask for food. Nobody will give him anything, so the ingenious beggar comes up with a plan. At one last door, instead of asking for food, he offers to cook something very unique — stone soup. He says all it needs is water and a special stone. The homeowner is curious and agrees to it. Quickly, the beggar begins asking for additional ingredients to make the soup even better. Every single vegetable and meat eventually ends up in it, and the soup is, of course, delicious — although the proverbial stone had nothing to do with it.
Those who become interested in the use of data in art and design inevitably learn about the work of great designers, programmers, and artists like Edward Tufte, Ben Fry, and others. The news media almost unavoidably uses data visualization — “data viz” — as a tool to explain complex ideas that involve large numbers, shifts in time, vast geographical distributions, and the various correlations among them. Nicholas Feltron even popularized the idea of harvesting data to visualize your personal life.