Visualization: The Medium - Data Points: Visualization That Means Something - page 420

FIGURE 2-27 A History of the Sky (2011) by Ken Murphy, http://datal.ws/25s
Again, this brings you back to, “What is data art?” Or more important, “What
is visualization?” It's a medium with a wide range of applications. There are
genres of visualization within a spectrum, but there are no clear-cut bound-
aries (which there doesn't need to be). Like movies, which can be both a
documentary and a drama or even a comedy and a horror, a visualization
work can be art and factual.
For example, Stamen Design, known for both practical and beautiful interac-
tive maps, put an artistic spin on geography with its experimental prettymaps ,
shown in Figure 2-29. They mapped freely available, community-generated
data from Flickr, Natural Earth, and OpenStreetMap, which provided six layers
of data. Mapped separately, the geography looks standard, but when you map
them all at once with semi-transparency, you get something else.