NYTimes Data Artist Jer Thorp on Humanized Data at the Intersection of Science, Art, and Design

On the poetics of probability, or what the architecture of the social web has to do with landing in Hawaii.

In his fantastic recent talk from TEDxVancouver, my friend Jer Thorp — data artist in residence at The New York Times and Brain Pickings regular — takes us on a sweeping tour of his work and ethos, living at the intersection of science, art, and design.

[We need] an inclusion in this dialogue from artists, from poets, from writers — from people who can bring a human element into this discussion. Because I believe that this world of data is going to be transformative to us.”

Among the projects Jer shows are All The Names, Project Cascade, a New York Times initiative that visualizes the underlying structures of conversation and activity on the social web, a harrowing algorithmic installation displaying the names of those who perished in the 9/11 attacks not based on alphabetical order but based on data about who they were and where they were with when they died, GoodMorning!, a beautiful visualization of 11,000 “good morning” tweets sent over a 24-hour period, NYTimes: 365/360, which captures the top organizations and personalities for every year between 1985 and 2001 and the connections between them in a single graphic for each year, and Open Paths, which allows you to liberate your iPhone location data from Apple’s grip to own, use, or donate to meaningful research.

Underpinning Jer’s examples is a powerful common thread of humanizing data and making it a living piece of our personal histories and cultural poetics.

Inspired? Jer has made much of his source code freely available, along with excellent tutorials, and hosts regular workshops on how to wring magic from data.

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Francesco Franchi on Visual Storytelling and Representation vs. Interpretation

On the design as journalism and how to navigate the spectrum between art and information.

The shape of journalism in the age of data continues to evolve and shift as we hone new ways of framing what matters in the world. In this wonderful teaser for Visual Storytelling: Inspiring a New Visual Language, one of the 11 best art and design books of 2011, Italian art director and information designer Francesco Franchi discusses the role of the designer as a translator of journalism. Franchi cites 1930s pictogram pioneer Otto Neurath and modern-day life-visualizer Nicholas Felton as his inspiration, and zooms in on the relationship between form and content on the spectrum between art and information.

Visual journalism means a combination between graphic and narrative. So, it is at the same time representation but also an interpretation of reality to develop an idea.”

Visual Storytelling features a fantastic full interview with Franchi.

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The Art of Medicine: Mapping the Body in 2,000 Years of Images and Imagination

From ancient etchings to electron microscopes, or what aspirin has to do with visualizing consciousness.

Since time immemorial, humanity has been turning its gaze outward, ordering the heavens, and inward, mapping the mind, in an effort to better understand who we are and where we belong. The human body itself has always been a fascinating frontier of inquiry as we’ve bridged art and science to visualize the living fabric of our shared existence. The Art of Medicine: Over 2,000 Years of Images and Imagination offers a remarkable and unprecedented visual journey into our collective corporal curiosity with a breathtaking selection of rare paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, artifacts, manuscripts, manuals and digital art culled from London’s formidable Wellcome Collection. Contextualized by medical historian Julie Anderson and science writers Emm Barnes and Emma Shackleton, these magnificent ephemera span cultures and eras as diverse as Ancient Persia and Renaissance Europe to paint a powerful, visceral portrait of our civilization’s evolving ideas about health, illness, and the body.

Organ Man, with Arteries, the Stomach and Internal Organs, artist unknown, from The Apocalypse, c. 1420–1430

ink and watercolor

Image courtesy of Wellcome Library, London

Nude Female Anatomical Figure, artist unknown, from Arzneibuch, 1524–c. 1550

color wash and ink

Image courtesy of Wellcome Images, London

Charles Williams (1798–c.1830), 25 June 1813

etching with watercolor

Image courtesy of Wellcome Library, London

El hombre como palacio industrial (Man as a Palace of Industry), Fritz Kahn 1888–1968, 1930

lithograph

color-enhanced scanning electron micrograph

Image courtesy of Wellcome Images, London

(For a related treat, see this 2009 student animation based on Kahn’s iconic infographic.)

Artist Anthony Gormley writes in the foreword:

The body is the root of all our experience, through it all our impressions of the world come and from it all we have to share with the world is expressed. A collection such as Wellcome’s is an extraordinary resource for thinking about the body, both as a thing, a metaphor, and the place where we all live and on which our consciousness depends.

…

We live in and with the body, yet as many of the images here show, we need to constantly re-imagine it. Wellcome’s collection, open to the convergence of the forensic and the imaginative, allows for the mind of the curious to recognize the body as a time machine headed on an ultimately entropic journey.”

Aspirin Crystals, Annie Cavanagh and David McCarthy, 2006

color enhanced scanning electron micrograph

color-enhanced scanning electron micrograph

Image courtesy of Annie Cavanagh and David McCarthy, Wellcome Images, London

Quinidine Crystals, Spike Walker, 2006

polarised light micrograph

Image courtesy of Spike Walker, Wellcome Images, London

Day 711, The Daily Stream of Consciousness, Bobby Baker, 2008

watercolour and pencil

etching with watercolor

Image courtesy of Bobby Baker, Wellcome Images, London

(You might recall Baker’s Drawing Mental Illness, superb in its entirety, from pickings past.)

Equal parts fascinating and fanciful, The Art of Medicine is a magnificent almanac of the body’s timeless mystery and its visual vocabulary.

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