this guy works on how to display data in meaningful graphical form. his site is cool and leads you to a lot of other neat visualizations of data... given that humans are accumulating about a TB a minute of new data we need ways like this of making sense of it all.
http://hci.stanford.edu/jheer/

also here's a cool book you can browse that deals with the topic
http://www.amazon.com/reader/0596157...pt#reader-link