The subreddit “Data Art” has become really popular over the years. When r/DataArt reached 10,000 subscribers, the moderator u/jmerlinb decided to personally send out a DataVizDigest email summarizing the top posts of that season every 3 months. “Because data should not only be informative, but also beautiful.” If you're interested, you can sign up for their mailing list. Also, make sure to check out the most upvoted posts on the "ArtyCharty" Twitter page!

Bored Panda got in touch with Jack Merlin Bruce, also known as u/jmerlinb, the moderator of the "Data Art" subreddit. We were intrigued to learn about the inspiration behind the creation of this subreddit. Jack revealed that during the early stages of his career in data visualization, he crafted a lot of designs for various fandom communities on Reddit, such as r/GameOfThrones, r/Pokemon, and r/Chess. “I wanted to show them their passion in a new way, and for me to get a chance to design stuff I thought looked really cool. Stuff you might want to hang up on your wall, or that you would see in a coffee table book.”

“It was great fun,” the moderator continued, “And these works I produced tended to be quite successful in these fan communities, but were significantly less successful in the one place I thought they would have been a natural fit for - and that was (at the time) the world's largest data visualization: r/DataIsBeautiful. And this was strange to me, seeing as they were so well received in other spaces.”

“But this isn't actually a surprise once you look into the stated aim on the sidebar of r/DataIsBeautiful: ‘Aesthetics are an important part of information visualization, but pretty pictures are not the sole aim of this subreddit.’ In other words, there are two sides to all data visualizations: the story, and the aesthetics. On one extreme, you can have a chart made in 1990s Microsoft Excel that looks horrendous but yet tells a great story. On the other extreme, you can have a chart meticulously designed by a world-class graphics designer which looks stunning in the aesthetics department but has no meat to it, no story. There's nothing inherently wrong with either type, it just depends on what your audience is expecting - and r/DataIsBeautiful catered to the first example... but I soon came to realize there was no community at the time that catered to the second example, to the ‘pretty pictures’. And so /r/DataArt was born - a subreddit for visualizations you ‘could hang up on your living room wall’.”

According to Jack, the main goal of r/DataArt is to offer people a space where they can try out new ideas and approaches to thinking about and working with data. “While our primary aim is to allow people to share artworks, we also make an exception for data visualization that might not necessarily be aesthetically pleasing, but which pushes the boundaries of the medium itself.

We've had people posting all sorts of amazing and unique work - charts that they knitted with colored thread, 3D-printed earthquake seismograms, data sonification (where sound is used to encode numeric values as opposed to color/shape/size, etc.), VR-based visualizations - all of this stuff was welcome in our community. I wanted r/DataArt to as closely mimic the experience of walking through a modern art exhibition but for data.”

In addition to sharing visually appealing visualizations, r/DataArt distinguishes itself as a community that prioritizes content curation more than others. “But as aesthetics are (by and large) subjective, this can be difficult when confronted with what is probably the bane of our moderation team (shout out to u/OdBox), and that is the infographic,” Jack shared.

“There is nothing inherently wrong with infographics. When done well, they can be amazing at conveying complex information in easily digestible ways. However, for some reason they tend to attract a spammy crowd, and /r/DataArt gets our fair share of these submissions, most of which we remove. There are times when these removal decisions might seem arbitrary - as it is impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when an infographic becomes a piece of ‘data art’ and vice versa. But alas, a line has to be drawn somewhere. I guess it really goes back to the reason why I created this sub in the first place: there was no centralizing community for data art, but there were plenty of communities online for infographics (e.g. Reddit’s own /r/Infographics). r/DataArt - as with all communities - is ultimately defined by what it is not.”

Aesthetics is all about making things look pleasing. When we apply aesthetics to data, we can transform dull numbers into visually attractive and easier-to-comprehend elements. We asked Jack about his thoughts on how the combination of aesthetics and data enhances our understanding and appreciation of information. According to the moderator, we are all inundated, overloaded and overstuffed with content. “From the moment we wake to the moment we sleep we are often hooked into a near-constant stream of information. And the reality is most data in its raw form can actually be pretty dry, it just can't compete. Our monkey brains just aren't wired that way.

But what our brains are fantastic at interacting with are things like color, shape, size, patterns, orientation, and all the facets that sum up to create our sense of sight. That's why so much of our brain power is dedicated to vision, more than any of our other senses. As such, data visualization is how we use our brain's architecture to get it to understand and interact with traditionally dry, data-based, complex topics. In other words: aesthetics are to data what touch screens are to computers.”

Without the visualization aspect of data, we'd be left navigating an endless roiling ocean of meaningless digits without a map or even a paddle to orient us. But while proper visualization does have far-reaching implications in big important areas of society - like multi-billion dollar government infrastructure investments or medical imaging - I believe there should always be space for that cool-looking poster you just wanted to hang up on your wall, and that's why r/DataArt exists.”