“In a data driven world, infographics are the new art.” So goes a quote by Ed Cotton that inspired Noah and Faris to write a piece for the latest issue of Contagious.

We have data coming out of our ears. There’s simply too much of it — it’s like drinking from a firehose, to borrow a phrase — and it comes at us from a myriad of sources. So we value and pay greater attention to those who are able to make some sort of order from the chaos, and then who can tell us what it all means.

There are lots of examples of this: The book Freakonomics is entirely about plowing through reams of data, for example. Another example is the aggregator we here at Naked built to stream all our collective twitters and links and pictures. Or there’s Alltop, a site that collects stories from all over the blogosphere and organizes them by topic. Or Critical Metrics, which bills itself as a “bibliographic database of highly recommended songs.” There are a ton more out there, I’m sure.

But Noah and Faris’s piece focuses on those who have taken all that data and made it look good. Infographics. Visualizations. The sorts of things that make the geek in us tear up just a little because it’s all just so pretty. (Seriously, I would sit there and look at The Wall Chart of World History for hours.)

They have lots of examples in there, like We Feel Fine (the pic above). But don’t take my word for it, see what they have to say for yourself. Faris talks about the piece on his blog here, and Noah does the same here. And Faris has the PDF for you to download here.