Visualisations are a powerful tool when it comes to helping us make sense of data. Exploiting our perceptual abilities is a very efficient means of finding novel and interesting relationships and patterns in data that we simply don’t notice when staring at the raw numbers.
The following documentary discusses data visualisation and why it is becoming extremely important: Data is now free and ubiquitous; the skills, tools and insight required to make sense of that data is now the rarer commodity.
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/
One of the things I like in that video is the point that we shouldn’t loose sight of the message behind the sexy visuals. It seems a lot of infographics and visualisations are aesthetically pleasing but not very communicative!