Visual analytics and data science are hot. As we create more data than ever before, we seek newer, better, faster ways to make sense of it and to know what actions we should take to improve our world. We’re told that this is the age of big data, and that’s a new thing. But the truth is that data has been hot for 100 years and the challenges to see it and understand it are fundamentally the same.

In 1914, New Yorker Willard Brinton wrote the first book on communicating data, Graphic Methods for Presenting Facts. “Millions of dollars yearly are spent in the collection of data,” he said. Those who could afford cutting-edge punch-card processing machines could handle more data than ever before (around 3,000 records per hour, to be precise!).

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