Data is currency. Handled with purpose and a little creativity, it is the magic ingredient that ensures your programming hits the right note; that your communications stand out from the crowd; and that, when it comes to decision making or reporting to your board, you can act with confidence knowing that the answers are at your fingertips.

But what happens when you make the leap beyond the day-to-day application of data and cross-reference data sets in new ways to produce something fresh? When you re-imagine the function and application of the information that you hold, to develop products or commentaries with their own integrity and value that surpasses the original purpose for which the data was gathered?

One example of this kind of wide-thinking approach comes from Nesta and Ukie here in the UK, who combined data from games review sites including Mobygames and Gamespot with Government statistics and financial data from Companies House to map previously unrecognised hubs of gaming activity around the UK, charting their regional specialisms. The map provided new, concrete evidence of the gaming industry‘s close geographical proximity to those universities offering games courses as well as to other creative industries such as film and television, music, software and design.

Another kind of mapping visualisation, this time based around the live music business, was produced by LBi (now DigitasLBi) using n0tice.com to produce interactive content for the Guardian’s Music Blog. Drawing in location data and content from sources including tweeted reviews; Instagram photos; bands and artists’ gig listings and posts from the Guardian’s page at n0tice.com, they created an interactive map combining social content; listings and commentaries to provide an up-to-the-minute picture of the UK’s live music scene. The Guardian’s map is no longer active, but Guardian Media platform n0tice.com continue to provide UGC (User Generated Content) solutions for organisations around the world.

The team at the LaNacion data blog in Buenos Aires, meanwhile, are living proof that you don’t need vast resources to translate information into content whose worth is more than the sum of its parts. In 2012, determined to combine a range of data sets to visualize the system for bus subsidies in Argentina but lacking web programming skills, they borrowed the services of an interactive designer and headed to a local Starbucks to teach themselves to use Tableau, a cloud-based platform designed to ‘make databases and spreadsheets understandable to ordinary people’. Their work was shortlisted in 2012 Data Journalism award, and they have since created one of the best and most innovative data journalism sites in South America.

Quality, data-driven content brought to life through striking visuals represents the lifeblood of many modern media outlets, and, for anyone with a stake in content-based marketing, the question of how to transform raw information into bite-sized nuggets of shareable goodness is a very hot topic indeed.  The Guardian has recently streamlined its Visual journalism, data journalism and audience development groups into a single Guardian Visuals team under the direction of a new Guardian Visuals editor. They will employ Orphan, The Guardian’s in-house data analytics platform, to create multi-disciplinary stories around big events collaborating closely with the newsroom to develop deep data-driven news stories. Aron Pilhofer, The Guardian’s executive editor for digital (formerly of the New York Times) cites Medium and Upworthy as inspirations. The New York Times itself, meanwhile, is an enthusiastic advocate of these kinds of illustrative news stories made possible using tools such as Google fusion tables, Tableau, (UNESCO and The Wall Street Journal are fans) Gephi, OutWit Hub, and Google Refine.

Around the world, the ambition to translate and transform data into something both beautiful and useful; something engaging that is more than it seemed at first glance has given rise to a surge of accessible events and resources designed to help individuals and organisations create their own visualisations and data-led narratives. The Eyeo Festival in Minneapolis; Tapestry Conference in Athens; Open Vis Conference in Boston and the free site Visualizing.org are all great starting points for those with a shared interest in making sense of complex issues through data and design.