In an era of sleek infographics and precisely plotted scatter charts, there's something compelling, profoundly human, and even emotional about hand-drawn representations of data.

To borrow from the ever-sharp Maria Popova in her review of Dear Data by Stefanie Posavec and Giorgia Lupi, hand-drawn data visualizations like the ones below have the potential to "reclaim the poetic granularity of the individual from the homogenizing aggregate-grip of Big Data."

Here's a roundup of some of our favorite data artists:

1) Stefanie Posavec and Giorgia Lupi

Designer and 2018 Spring Festival presenter Stefanie Posavec collaborated with information designer Giorgia Lupi to create the Dear Data Project -- a highly personal visual exploration of data in our everyday lives (see above). For 52 weeks, they exchanged hand-drawn postcards representing a personal data set: glances at the clock, animals they saw, moments of indecision. The image above captures a week of Posavec's laughter: the colors, lines, and scale of the circles correspond to specific contexts of laughter. The entire series of postcards and the designers' thoughts on the project as a whole are now collected in a beautiful book.

2) Mona Chalabi

Data journalist Mona Chalabi really loves numbers and demystifying data. She's the data editor for The Guardian US, and her sketchbook-like visualizations address all kinds of issues from the prevalence of interracial marriage to popular dog names. Her talk "3 Ways to Spot a Bad Statistic"–especially with its footnotes–is helpful for decoding the sea of data we confront every day. Chalabi's tongue-in-cheek style and sense of humor make exploring data both engaging and amusing.

3) Patti Maciesz

Artist and mother Patti Maciesz is invoicing the patriarchy and her California representatives for unpaid work related to childcare, emotional labor, and missed opportunities (see image below). If you're a caregiver, you can take a quiz to help quantify how much the patriarchy owes you. Writer Ann Friedman interviewed Maciesz on the Call Your Girlfriend podcast. In addition to her writing and the CYG podcast, Friedman herself is known for her insightful pie chart series, which appears in her weekly newsletter.