Love this sense-making idea! In a way, it is something that we statisticians do too. When we get data, most of the time they don't make any sense. But to find any sense to them, we also do the same thing - we get rid of the useless data, we make sure they're from a reliable source, we "clean" the data up and make sure they are consistent and harmonized, then we aggregate them and find patterns and trends, then we finally can make conclusions from what the trends say. But most important though is how to make these concluding trends understandable to people. So we resort to data visualizations to highlight or make compelling a particular insight that the data illustrates.