Democratizing Visualization By Lowering the Barrier of Entry
By Alberto Cairo & Simon Rogers, Google News Initiative
Those of us who began our careers decades ago remember a time when visualization tools were expensive and hard to learn, data was sparse and difficult to obtain, and the literature about how to design visualizations was scant and heavily biased toward statistical analysis alone.
How things have changed. In the last decade, visualization’s popularity, adoption, and diversity have increased dramatically. We believe that democratizing it even further is a goal worth pursuing — by promoting flexible principles and good practices, and by creating software tools that aren’t just easy to use but also free and open-source. We believe that, pretty much like writing, visualization can be learned and used by anyone.
Back in 2016, we began a collaboration consisting of inviting top designers from all over the world to create experimental, open-source, data-driven stories based on Google search and YouTube data and Alberto’s art direction. The results were projects such as Moritz Stefaner’s The Rhythm of Food, Nadieh Bremer’s Beautiful in English, and Xaquín G.V’s How to Fix a Toilet.
