From numbers to discourse and action: Visualizing meaning through data as it happens

The use of data to influence decisions has become near ubiquitous in fields from education to public policy. It has become an instrument to confer validation to policy crafted by those in power. New initiatives to make data widely available have led to new strategies for interpreting and representing derived meaning. Data visualization is one method of interpreting vast amounts of numerical data organized in tabular form. In post-industrialized American culture, having more is often considered as being better than less, but new ways to use macro ideas, termed ‘data visualizations’, can inform individual narratives with other qualities. We illustrate these qualities with data visualizations of cultural phenomena and real-time mapping of the We Are Data (WAD) website to show immediate meaning and emotional response in relationships that emerge in virtual locations. Visualized data, we argue, can provide an event in which one’s preconceived interpretations can either be confirmed or called into question quickly and visually, and as a result, new knowledge emerges.