We live in a datified world, and artists and journalists are coming up with more and more creative ways to visualize it. Over the past few years, infographics have become so prevalent that they have become a medium unto themselves. This year, Houghton Mifflin made an addition to its "Best American" series with the publication of The Best American Infographics 2013, edited by Gareth Cook. With the help of a brain trust of visualization experts, Cook hand-picked the year's best infographics—the ones that make the viewer think, smile, laugh, and maybe pause with wonder or consternation. In an interview with Cook about the new collection, he explained what makes a good infographic (and why some are so bad), why we find ourselves again in the midst of an information arms race, and why Napoleon deserves some credit for the development of the medium.

Linda Kinstler: When did you start to think of infographics as a medium unto themselves?

Gareth Cook: They very quickly have become a very important new medium, and this series is a recognition of the fact that they’ve become influential, and that they shape how people think, and that they’re a mode of communication just like writing. This is a recognition of their power and a recognition of the best work. But the collection is meant to get people to think about them as a new medium with it’s own rules and its own power to shape how we think.

Infographics are actually very old, but they’ve just sort of in the last few years exploded, and we see them everywhere now. What has happened is, critical judgment is lagging behind how much people are seeing infographics. What I mean by that is, when people read a story or they read text, they know they should be critical about it, they should not assume that everything in there is correct, they should know that the writer is going to be picking and choosing details to make the point they’re trying to make. That’s something that we all are very familiar with.

I think we need to bring the same critical skills to infographics. That’s partly what I’m hoping this collection will do. So that when people see an infographic, they won’t just say to themselves, ‘Oh, this must be true, because they’re showing all this data’ instead, they will ask the same critical questions that you would of any other medium.