A short reflection on 10 years of visualizing data
This year marks my first decade as a data visualization practitioner. It also interestingly marks the first year I have done something professionally for longer than I have made coffee (which was for 9 years of my life).
It’s funny to write this post up on Feb 14th, Valentine’s day. But in a way, I’m already waxing a bit romantic and sentimental, so perhaps it is appropriate. But I love the community of people who visualize data. These are my people. It’s strange to think that I identify so much of myself with a professional field of work. But as a barista of 9 years, I did the same thing. I took pride in making coffee (and still love to do it, just at home spending money on it instead of making money).
But Moritz Stefaner, one of the 5 people who I can resolutely cite as my inspirations for getting into data visualization (the others being Tamara Munzner, Alberto Cairo, Nadieh Bremer, and Mike Bostock), shared an older piece of his on linkedin. This short blog post is my response to that.
Recognizing generations
10 years ago (2015), I started out in visualization. And just about 10 years ago (according to the 2005 date in Moritz’s piece), Moritz had been on the scene for 10 years already.
One of the funny things about being a 2nd/3rd (or 4th?) generation practitioner in an emerging/new/young field like data visualization is that sometimes I forget about all of the battles that the previous generation(s) fought. I forget the things they were wrestling with. I forget the “lines in the sand” they tried to draw (or tried to disturb). I take for granted the spaces they made for people like me to come onto the scene.
What has my “generation” done? Are we making grand statements about our industry like those before us? Are we writing about who we think we are? Even if we get it wrong, I think we should still do it. We need to try! When we do, sometimes a timeless piece like Moritz’s here bubbles back to the surface years later to re-teach us lessons we’ve forgotten.
This is another reason why I love the Data Visualization Society’s Nightingale publication. That’s who we are, right now. Those are the things we care about, what we want to say, those are many of the new battles being waged. I love that publication immensely.
I hope we keep it up. We need to keep writing. There is something powerful about really wrestling with these ideas, sharing what we’ve wrestled with, reading other people’s pieces on similar issues, and growing up together through it all.
Making who we are, right now
I already wrote about Alberto’s book, The Art of Insight, back in 2023. But I think he recognized, as one of those 1st generation members of our community, that who we are is growing and expanding. We don’t need to create some kind of hard rules or guidelines or boundaries about what is or isn’t visualization.
But we do need to write about ourselves and our own perspectives. We need to share what we think is good, what we’ve been learning, what we care about. I don’t mean to write this to suggest that we aren’t. But I am writing this to stress that we need to remember that we should.
Heck, I think practitioners like Amy Cesal, Doug Schepers, and Sarah Fossheim can all take immense credit for pushing the boundaries of accessibility in visualization. They’ve all written and worked at this intersection, but also have explicitly put in labor to teach other practitioners and invite people in. These are my people. These are the folks I would say are part of our own “first generation” push to create a community. I also know that we are still working on discovering who we are and honing our craft, together. I hope we are making space for the next generations to come along and do accessibility and visualization, too.
But anyone can also do this. So perhaps I’ll say this to you, my reader: write about who you are and what you care about. It’s funny how writing something has this strange effect: it helps us discover who we share ideas with, helps us think and reflect more deeply about whatever we are doing, and of course, it builds a sense of identity and community. Maybe 10 years down the road, some of what we said will have stuck, or it might get dug back up like Moritz’s piece and gain some new teeth. But whether we crack some code of timeless writing or not, we should take some time to do it every now and then.