"As knowledge increases amongst mankind, and transactions multiply, it becomes more and more desirable to abbreviate and facilitate the modes of conveying information from one person to another, and from one individual to the many."
"Everything that can be expressed in numbers, can be represented by lines."
John Playfair
William Playfair, 1786
Ben Shneiderman, 1996
The Macroscope, by Joel de Rosnay
"OpenRefine (formerly Google Refine) is a powerful tool for working with messy data: cleaning it, transforming it from one format into another and extending it with web services"
"If you’ve ever tried to do anything with data provided to you in PDFs, you know how painful it is — there's no easy way to copy-and-paste rows of data out of PDF files. Tabula allows you to extract that data into a CSV"
"The missing link between spreadsheets and vector graphics"
"Tableau can help anyone find
real answers in their data."