Seeing is Believing: A Reading List on Making Meaning from Data
February 10, 2026 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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Some 36,000 years ago, an Aurignacian—an anatomically modern Paleolithic human about 5′ 9″ tall—stood facing the cold walls of a vast cave by the Ardèche river. Patiently he scraped the surface using sticks and bones, removing a fine layer of brown clay and exposing the white limestone beneath. As darkness fell, he lit his pine torch. He traced the natural ridges and recesses of the rock with his fingers. Taking a piece of charcoal, he made his first mark.
We step, through film and image, into the prehistoric darkness of the Grotte Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, or the Chauvet Cave, in southern France, and stand before the same walls. Passing horses, reindeer, aurochs, cave bears, woolly rhinos, and mammoths finely rendered in charcoal and red ocher, we come upon the deepest End Chamber. From the right end of a magnificent 36-foot panel emerges a pride of 16 cave lions, male and female, intently stalking a fleeing herd of bison to the left.
If that thought doesn’t blow your mind, consider that the earliest known narrative cave art—“visual storytelling”—in Leang Karampuang, Sulawesi, Indonesia, is at least 51,200 years old. Three humans and a big red pig, just not enough PR.
Sophisticated art by any standards, but could we interpret this as proto-humans making proto-meaning from proto-data? Observing, counting, recording. Abstracting context, intent, spatiotemporal movement, relationships. Making surfaces, tools, and pigments; scraping, contouring, outlining, drawing, stumping. Creating perspective and depth of field, orienting, backgrounding, superimposing, juxtaposing, foregrounding. Composing and animating. Gathering, watching the stories unfold by flickering torchlight, sound, and music. But above all, bringing to life a new idea that reshaped the world, the idea of the image—a picture that means something.
Now we’re drowning in AI slop and “infographics,” much of which is, to put it mildly, swill. In the absence of visual intelligence, what we have is a prescription for misinformation, miscomprehension, and general mayhem. How do we parse all this complex visual information; how do we retain sanity in a world gone mad; how do we make meaning? In other words, how do we learn to see?
How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking? (Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker, January 2023)
In this Psyche video titled “Making the invisible visible,” Judy Fan, a Stanford psychologist, takes us into the workings of human cognition, “from cave art to subatomic sketches—how drawing has accelerated human progress.”
Here I recall an anecdote about visual thinking from “Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman!”—one I never forgot and have put to good and frequent use. The physicist says: “The mathematicians would come in with a terrific theorem, and they’re all excited. As they’re telling me the conditions of the theorem, I construct something which fits all the conditions. You know, you have a set (one ball)—disjoint (two balls). Then the balls turn colors, grow hairs, or whatever, in my head as they put more conditions on. Finally they state the theorem, which is some dumb thing about the ball which isn’t true for my hairy green ball thing, so I say, ‘False!’” ðŸ¦
Does our particular mode of thinking—verbal, visual, or something else—influence the way we think about ourselves, others, and the world we inhabit? What might the singular gifts of visual thinking be? Rothman draws from Temple Grandin’s lucid book Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, or Abstractions, and places various modes of thinking along a verbal-visual continuum.
Grandin proposes imagining a church steeple. Verbal people, she finds, often make a hash of this task, conjuring something like “two vague lines in an inverted V,” almost as though they’ve never seen a steeple before. Object visualizers, by contrast, describe specific steeples that they’ve observed on actual churches: they “might as well be staring at a photograph or photorealistic drawing” in their minds. Meanwhile, the spatial visualizers picture a kind of perfect but abstract steeple—“a generic New England-style steeple, an image they piece together from churches they’ve seen.” They have noticed patterns among church steeples, and they imagine the pattern, rather than any particular instance of it.
How Information Graphics Reveal Your Brain’s Blind Spots (Lena V. Groeger, ProPublica, April 2016)
In preparation for this reading list, I attended a few industry dataviz seminars and read a bunch of specialist Substacks to understand what’s going on behind the scenes, how true or false my state-of-AI-in-dataviz notions might be. The short version is that it’s here to stay. But there’s music in this sea of noise. The MIT Visualization Group explores how computation can “help amplify our cognition and creativity, while respecting our agency.”
How does visual thinking become visual design become visual communication? How does data become information become meaning? What is lost along the way? All this theory has traditionally been locked up in academic books and journals. Even layperson essays on the topic are surprisingly hard to find online. But we can do something in the interim to sharpen our visual intelligence. We can pay more attention.
As we turn to infographics for more and more of our news and information about the world, Groeger’s illustrated essay could help fill in a few gaps about how we understand how we understand.
Chances are, you probably think your mind works pretty well. It might lead you astray now and then, but usually it helps you make good decisions and remember things reliably. At the very least, you’re probably confident that it doesn’t change depending on the time of day or what you had to eat.
But you’d be wrong. Our brains fool us all the time. And we typically have no idea that it’s happening.
Let’s look at some of the wacky things our minds make us think and do. And then we’ll examine how graphics, including charts, interactives, and other visual tools, can help show us our mind’s shortcomings.
Visualizing Data to Save Lives: A History of Early Public Health Infographics (Murray Dick, The MIT Press Reader, August 2020)
Surrounded by infographics of every description produced by an $11-billion industry, we might be forgiven for thinking that we are the ones who discovered the power of visualizing data. Not so. There’s over 200 years of evidence that shows the influential, decision-making presence of data visualizations in the public domain.
What if you put 300 years’ worth of infographic milestones into one interactive display? Ambitious? R. J. Andrews of Info We Trust has done just that. Read the essay or check out the evolving interactive project.
As Dick puts it, “From 1820 to 1830, an enthusiasm for statistics began to emerge across the western world, leading to an era of statistics concerned with reform. It was led by individuals who sought to disrupt what they saw as the chaos of politics and replace it with a new apolitical regime of empirical, observed fact.” An epidemiologist, a physician, and a nurse walk into a bar, where a scoundrel of an engineer is already waiting. Chaos or order, sometimes the stakes were really life or death.
For more on high-stakes, problem-solving data visualizations, see the ProPublica essay “Infographics in the Time of Cholera,” and The New Yorker essay “When Graphs Are a Matter of Life and Death.”
Nightingale’s “Notes on Matters Affecting the Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army” (1858) was damning in its conclusions about the consequences of the deleterious sanitary conditions in the army hospitals of the Crimea; deaths from (mostly) preventable disease outnumbered deaths on the battlefield (or injuries accrued on the battlefield) by a factor of seven to one. For Nightingale, disease was a quality of the human condition, not something that may be isolated and treated in a particular context.
Nightingale had a natural flair for infographic design, or “statistical aesthetics,” to quote John Eyler, which she used to accentuate her work. She was as attuned to the persuasive power of data visualization as she was in her use of written rhetorical techniques.
How W. E. B. Du Bois Meticulously Visualized 20th-Century Black America (Jasmine Weber, Hyperallergic, February 2019)
The 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris had a very special exhibit—a collection of 57 hand-drawn charts depicting the state of Black American life. This was the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, a polymathic public intellectual whose skills spanned several fields and professions, and his collaborators.
Here’s a piece from WIRED, “The Nerdy Charm of Artisanal, Hand-Drawn Infographics.” Never underestimate analog stuff. And the vintage classics, they’re all hand-drawn.
The exhibit showcased Black contributions to the nation across several measures—no mean feat when slavery was still fresh in the collective memory: history; education; effects of education upon literacy, occupation, and property; mental development; mechanical ability; business and industrial development; initiatives; general racial conditions. Conceptually and aesthetically innovative, the charts proved a milestone as “an honest straightforward exhibit of a small nation of people, picturing their life and development without apology or gloss, and above all made by themselves.”
For more context, see also Hua Hsu’s New Yorker essay “What W. E. B. Du Bois Conveyed in His Captivating Infographics.”
W. E. B. Du Bois is best known for his sharp, sociological imagination and groundbreaking book of racial philosophy, The Souls of Black Folk. But the writer, historian, and Pan-African civil rights activist also had a remarkable visual mind. Among his many talents, Du Bois was a designer and curator of Black culture, the most explicit example being his data portraits, which vibrantly visualized the complexities of racial segregation, which Du Bois iconically dubbed “the color line.”. . . . With these infographics, Du Bois colorfully visualized Black America, which he called a “nation within a nation,” depicting the notable progress made by Black Americans in spite of centuries of global anti-Blackness, chattel slavery, and Jim Crow—oppressive, institutionalized structures strengthened by the social Darwinist paradigms that dominated mainstream science of the day.
The Hundred Trillion Stories in Your Head (Benjamin Ehrlich, The Paris Review, March 2017)
Given its ubiquity in popular science and culture, it’s easy to forget that neuroscience is a relatively young field. There was a time when we did not know how neurons looked, let alone how they worked.
Until you get your hands on the beautiful book of drawings or Ehrlich’s own book on Cajal, take a look at this collection from The Public Domain Review: “Early Illustrations of the Nervous System by Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal.” They shared the 1906 Nobel for Medicine but it was Cajal who prevailed in the end.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal never set out to become the Nobel-laureate father of neuroscience. To escape his brutally strict upbringing at the hands of his doctor father, Cajal spent his days immersed in fiction and dreaming of becoming an artist. But then he started sketching bones for his father. One thing led to another, and soon he was working with biologist Camillo Golgi’s “black reaction” technique, where tissue samples immersed in silver nitrate and observed under a microscope would show up inky black against a yellow background. A stunning, hand-drawn body of work was born, the best of which is collected in The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal.
Cajal modeled his scientific quest after literary heroes from his childhood. He cast himself in the mold of Crusoe, envisioning the brain as “a world consisting of a number of unexplored continents and vast stretches of unknown territory,” and devoting his work to “islands of discovery.” In 1888, working alone at the microscope in his home laboratory, Cajal observed the endpoint of a nerve fiber, a nearly imperceptible phenomenon that led him to declare that nerve cells were independent—thus beginning the saga of modern neuroscience. “The job of the anatomist,” Cajal writes, “is to separate the apparent from the real.” Like his beloved Don Quixote, he believed in an alternative view of the world; unlike Quixote, he succeeded in rallying the people around him, who eventually celebrated his foresight.
How did Cajal see what others could not?
1812: When Napoleon Ventured East (Alexey Novichkov and team, TASS, 2017)
Even though he’s most famous for his Napoleon map—his last one and he was pushing 90 at the time—Minard was no lucky late bloomer. Find more of his beautiful statistical maps in this National Geographic article: “The Underappreciated Man Behind the ‘Best Graphic Ever Produced.’”
When Edward Tufte, a statistician The New York Times calls the “Leonardo da Vinci of Data,” declares something “the best statistical graphic ever drawn,” and you’re a newish information designer, your green ears perk up, as mine did a long time ago. Now an aura of overexposure, cynicism, usual suspecthood, etc., surrounds the map, but was Tufte wrong? It turns out that Tufte did make it famous, but Charles-Joseph Minard’s map of Napoleon’s disastrous 1812 Russian campaign is a classic for a reason. I got chills when I first looked at it.
Inspiring as Minard and Tufte are, critical responses to their work are hard to come by. What you see here is a gorgeous interactive map from the Russian side. Made by a state-owned Russian news agency (there’s a CIA report; I checked), but one that swept up global design awards nevertheless. Read it like a novel. Watch it like a film.
In 1869, retired French civil engineer Charles Joseph Minard summarized eye witness accounts and drew a map illustrating Napoleon’s 1812 campaign against Russia and the defeat of the Grand Army. According to Minard, during the war’s bloody 197 days, the strength of Napoleon’s forces dwindled from 422,000 all the way down to 10,000.
Is it true that in 1812 Napoleon lost 97% of his troops? And if so, how did it happen and why?
Minard lays out some answers to these questions in the form of statistics and line width: tactical errors, hasty decisions, exhausting foot marches, fruitless battles, and a brutally severe climate.
How Feynman Diagrams Almost Saved Space (Frank Wilczek, Quanta Magazine, July 2016)
Feynman drove a yellow van with his famous diagrams painted onto its sides. Edward Tufte, perhaps more aesthetically inspired than most, once made giant sculptures of them using stainless steel tubing for a Fermilab exhibition called All Possible Photons: The Conceptual and Cognitive Art of Feynman Diagrams. Here’s the 20-page exhibition catalog.
Richard P. Feynman was a famous theoretical physicist. Celebrated in scientific circles, he also enjoyed mainstream popularity as a “curious character” who wrote popular books in which he discussed his thinking process, scientific work, and assorted adventures. As he was developing the theory of quantum electrodynamics, he came up with a graphical method to represent and organize the electromagnetic interactions among electrons and photons. Feynman diagrams, as they came to be known, are 2D graphical tools for representing particle interactions, with one axis corresponding to time and the other to space, used as a mechanism to systematically organize the mathematical terms in quantum field theory calculations.
Despite their eventual limitations, the diagrams remained, Wilczek says, “a treasured asset in physics, because they often provide good approximations to reality . . . . They help us bring our powers of visual imagination to bear on worlds we can’t actually see.”
Feynman started from scratch, drawing pictures whose stick-figure lines show links of influence between particles. The first published Feynman diagram appeared in Physical Review in 1949:
To understand how one electron influences another, using Feynman diagrams, you have to imagine that the electrons, as they move through space and evolve in time, exchange a photon, here labeled “virtual quantum.” This is the simplest possibility. It is also possible to exchange two or more photons, and Feynman made similar diagrams for that. Those diagrams contribute another piece to the answer, modifying the classical Coulomb force law. By sprouting another squiggle, and letting it extend freely into the future, you represent how an electron radiates a photon. And so, step by step, you can describe complex physical processes, assembled like Tinkertoys from very simple ingredients.
Look Inside the Extremely Rare Codex Seraphinianus, the Weirdest Encyclopedia Ever (Andrea Girolami interviews Luigi Serafini, WIRED, October 2013)
And that’s what happens when we try to make meaning—a coherent story—from “data” we cannot understand. Have you observed that the term “storytelling” means everything now, and therefore, nothing? It’s almost taboo to question its value. Even as we speak about visual work, we fail to notice the insidious assumption that all manner of life data, including visual, must somehow lead to a story, a verbal narrative, or they mean nothing. Sorry, cave people, we’ve failed you. Why not “fuck storytelling” for a bit, as writer Amit Chaudhuri says.
In 1981, a 27-year-old in Rome found himself in a feverish enchantment for some three years, whereupon he produced a book of text and drawings that was to drive readers wild, and then slightly mad, for more than four decades to come. No one understood the drawings. No one could read the text. The author is Luigi Serafini, and the book is the unparalleled Codex Seraphinianus, variously and repeatedly referred to as the strangest and most beautiful book in the world. This interview happened just after Rizzoli republished the rare, ever-evolving volume. Let me not spoil it for you.
While the WIRED interview attempts to situate the book in a broader cultural and technological context, here’s a more intimate, contemplative essay from Bird in Flight done two years later: “Luigi Serafini on How and Why He Created an Encyclopedia of an Imaginary World.” Katerina Babkina manages to coax Serafini into revealing his philosophy, his process, and the mystical underpinnings of his “meaningless,” made-up work.
Serafini: What I want my alphabet to convey to the reader is the sensation that children feel in front of books they cannot yet understand. I used it to describe analytically an imaginary world and give a coherent framework. The images originate from the clash between this fantasy vocabulary and the real world. It’s every artist’s dream to shape his own imagery. The Codex became so popular because it makes you feel more comfortable with your fantasies. Another world is not possible, but a fantasy one maybe is.
WIRED: What makes the Codex so relevant today?
Serafini: Its popularity rose steadily for many years and fell as it went out of print, now the new edition revived it. It’s a book that speaks about crisis and about communication and it’s quite apocalyptical, suited for the present times. Anything can happen inside the Codex . . .
Kanya Kanchana is a poet and philologist from India.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/02/10/making-meaning-from-data/
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