Tag Archives: Requiem for Science

Visual data that’s good enough to eat

John Brownlee in a June 30, 2014 article for Fast Company explores a facet of data visualization upending the notion that this is a purely visual specialty (Note: Links have been removed),

It would be fair to say that visualization maestro Moritz Stefaner eats up data. Over the years, he has used data for everything from identifying the world’s selfiest cities to showing the hidden network stringing together the world’s scientific institutions.

It was probably only a matter of time before Stefaner made his consumption of data literal. Stefaner is now exploring a new frontier in data viz. It’s called Data Cuisine, and it’s all about cooking up infographics that you can literally eat: a pizza that conveys the patterns of 100 years of Italian immigration, for example, or a salmon mousse that explores the environmental impacts of commercial fishing over the past decade.

Here’s one of the dishes you can see should you visit the Data Cuisine website’s Data Dishes webpage,

RequiemForScience

This fascinating dish provides a multi-layered representation of a simple, but striking statistic: science funding in Spain was cut by a staggering 34% over the last few years.

Antonija Kuzmanic decided to represent this huge drop in funding with two almond cakes (Tortas de Santiago) — based on the same recipe, but prepared differently. The first one was made applying “scientific” techniques (foaming the dough with a siphon and microwaving it for 45 seconds), representing the situation before the cuts, while the second cake represents today.

It was baked in the traditional way without advanced techniques, and turned out considerably drier and denser. In addition, the amount of sugar used in the cakes is proportional to the different amounts of funding in science, resulting in a much less enjoyable experience for the “non-science” cake.

 

Brownlee’s article offers a good overview of the project, the two organizers Mauritz Stefaner and Susanne Jaschko, and the first two workshops that were held in Helsinki (Nov. 2013) and in Barcelona (June 2014), respectively.

While Data Cuisine seems the best organized of the food data visualization movement, the proponents note other efforts on their Resources and reference projects page.