"When it comes to the visual representation of scientific information, in a scientific context, does aesthetic matter? In my day job at the British Library, I've spent the past year curating the upcoming Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Ideas exhibition. This experience has given me a phenomenal opportunity to think about the way we communicate and discover things in science. And, I think there's a strong case to be made for beautiful science. The visual representation of data is a fundamental part of what it means to be a scientist today. Whether a single data point plotted on a graph or a whole genome sequence, data visualisation helps us to examine, interpret, and contextualise information in a way that numbers and statistics often do not. Moreover, at a time when we are expected to process ever-increasing volumes of information, visualisations are often more readily digestible than some of the more 'traditional' alternatives; as the increased prominence of colourful 'data viz' work in the pages of our newspapers, websites, and in-flight magazines would attest. So you could be forgiven for thinking that data visualisation is a new fad that has emerged, hand-in-hand, with the current era of ' Big Data' and ' Open Data'."

Read more at http://blogs.plos.org/attheinterface/2014/02/13/case-beautiful-science/