Visualizing Big Data

WIRED has written some interesting pieces on Big Data and how we crunch numbers in the age of the petabyte. This image of a software bot working through Wikipedia is the kind of overview that visualizing data can give. Ambient devices connected to any number of online information sources are another way of creating our own emergent properties from unimaginably large quantities of data. Is it fair to call this artificial emergence? We are farming emergent properties from things we have created, rather than simply experiencing the emergent properties in the natural order such as the wetness of water. Maybe we can develop a new intelligence that allows us to harness our own forms of emergence to get the kind of information we need in complex situations as leaders and designers.