Visualization Making Big Data Meaningful

In CACM:  Includes some videos of data artists at work.

" ... Until recently, a good spreadsheet or perhaps a pie chart might have been sufficient to get a firm grip on a dataset. However, making sense of big data requires more, and with our increasing inundation with data comes new and creative opportunities to build unique interfaces.

That is why, powered by new technologies such as touchscreens and giant LCD monitors, so-called "data artists" are experimenting with ways to make huge amounts of data comprehensible and accessible to a broader range of people, and then displaying their data visualizations inside venues like the corporate facilities of companies like Microsoft and Google. ... " 

Note also the leveraging of multiple display mediums, like that experimented with using Business Sphere. Big and complex data can bring patterns to the surface and let our eyes do the pattern recognition.