February 4, 2026
Feelings meet spreadsheets
Data Poems
Data Poems: Charts that make you feel things—and argue about them
TLDR: An online gallery turns topics like war, climate, and language into striking “data poems.” The crowd split between art lovers and chart purists, sparking a beauty-versus-utility brawl while an old-school dev dropped nostalgic tales—proof that visual storytelling can move hearts and still rile the nerds.
An artist just turned cold numbers into “data poems”—moody visual stories about war, climate, languages, trade, rent, the Olympics, even UFOs and Bigfoot. Fans swooned over the visuals, from the tragic “Forget Me Not” (war casualties) to “FUSE” (global heat), and the glowing “Constellation” of language families. One admirer called the language map “especially beautiful” and immediately begged for a “tree of life” version. Another simply said these are “incredible” and wanted more—same, bestie. But the vibe got spicy when a purist marched in with a heel turn: data isn’t poetry, it’s geometry—and “rectilinear” (aka boxy) charts are better for computers. Cue a full-on aesthetic rumble: Team Feelings vs. Team Right Angles. Meanwhile, a veteran from the early ’90s chimed in with wistful nostalgia about crafting “fictional data sets” to break graphing software—proof that data art has always had chaotic roots. The thread sprinkled in humor too, with readers riffing on Bigfoot sightings and UFO charts like a tongue-in-cheek X-Files reboot. The takeaway? These visuals didn’t just look good—they stirred memories, sparked debate, and made people pick sides on the age-old question: should charts be beautiful or just useful. Why not both, Internet?
Key Points
- •“Data Poems” is a collection of data-driven visualizations organized by thematic categories.
- •Topics include war casualties (1914–2025), global temperature anomalies (1880–2025), and real-time air quality.
- •Language visualizations map families and trace evolution from protolanguages to modern languages.
- •Trade-focused works depict routes, density waves, total flow, global relationships, and rent burden.
- •Additional series cover Olympic medal counts (1896–2024), phyllotaxis patterns, aurora power history, UFO reports, and Bigfoot sightings.