A bright orange line emerges from the horizon at the left side of the screen. Getting brighter, it arcs upward—and then suddenly turns ashen gray before falling back to the horizon. More lines follow the first. Thousands upon thousands of lines. The visual is at once beautiful and daunting.
That's because the lines aren't merely lines. Each one represents the life of an American who was suddenly and violently snuffed out by gunfire. Each one is just a statistic in a database, but the "socially conscious" data visualization firm Periscopic brought the numbers to life in a dramatic illustration that makes a powerful statement: Some 7500 people have been killed by guns so far in 2013 (the orange lines), and those victims lost a projected 330,000-plus total years of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (the gray lines).
Such is the power of the data visualization, a unique blend of graphic art and data science that's helping both researchers and everyday people make sense of the ever-growing databases that increasingly influence our lives.
PeriscopicReleased in February 2013, this visualization of U.S. gun killings uses data from the FBI's Unified Crime Report and the World Health Organization's UNSD Demographic Statistics to tabulate the number of deaths and the number of years of life prematurely taken.
When done well (as in Periscopic's gun-death example), data visualizations can express the meanings hidden in massive data sets in an immediate and intuitive way. "I was shocked. I realized the scale I was looking at, and then I saw the volume," says Periscopic cofounder Dino Citraro. "It scared me."
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