What are the relations between digital cartography and hand-drawn maps?
The science is dividing the field of knowledge into disposable knowledge and reusable knowledge. Google maps are falling into the first category, while axonometric maps belong to the second, because they're suitable for being reused. An 11-year-old hand-drawn map still looks beautiful, whereas 11 years from now Google maps will be dated. Google and others are failing to present the beautifulness of our planet to us when doing their digital atlases.

Are you familiar with Baidu? The Chinese can't show satellite images of their cities so they model these detailed axonometric cityscapes.
Baidu shows very beautiful representations, similar to hand-drawn maps. They're like the depiction of a promise, telling you that it's a beautiful country to live in, whether it's true or not.

Reparieren leicht gemacht (1972), Verlag Das Beste, Stuttgart, 23 x 26 cm, 568 pp
Do you think the actual possibility of processing big datasets will affect other fields of visual design beyond data representation?
The digital has had a great impact not only on the production of information, but also on how to get to the sources. But this speed comes at a cost that shouldn't be underestimated, and that cost is precision. In the early days, information designers controlled the entire process and physically possessed the information. Nowadays, if you're doing a data visualisation using bytes that aren't on your hard drive, or that you don't even own, then you're dependent on other people. That's the digital drawback. The moment authoritarian countries decide to cut the wires, all the knowledge will be gone.

Tagxedo turns words -- famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters -- into a visually stunning word cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

We get a lot of infographic pitches. Almost all of them suck. Why? Because while they may well be "information plus graphics," they often lack what designer Francesco Franchi calls "infographic thinking." This isn’t just "how to make some numbers and vector graphics look clever together." It’s a narrative language--it’s "representation plus interpretation to develop an idea," to quote Franchi.

D3 allows you to bind arbitrary data to a Document Object Model (DOM), and then apply data-driven transformations to the document.