After reading Friendly & Denis D.J’s “Introduction” on Milestones in the history of thematic cartography, statistical graphics, and data visualization, it reassured my previous thought on the high level of creativity and knowledge that individuals who produced these infographics & maps had. In a time period when a large portion of data was manually collected and illustrated or assisted by machines, it was largely dependent on individuals to produce graphics that could be understood by the larger mass. In order to do this, you must have understood the large amount of data that one would be illustrating, who was the “target” population, and how can something be produced in a method that everyone can understand regardless of educational background. Nowadays, with the increased computational power that exists, an unfathomable amount of data can be processed in a matter of seconds and turned into an infographic. However, this still does not eliminate the need for someone to be behind the computer because at the end of the day, a computer does not think like a human and thus you need someone who can understand emotions to produce an impactful, and useful graphic.