The contemporary convergence of documentary practices and data visualization sets an interesting field for both creative and conceptual exploration. At the same time, however, at both levels we are still dealing with a challenge, a broad spectrum of possibilities still waiting to be filled with the full range of solutions. The aim of this text is to look at the phenomenon of interactive documents based on data visualization from two key perspectives. The first one is focused on the issue of the status of data and their visual representations in the context of Big Data as a set of culturally, socially, politically and business shaped database technologies, data analysis schemes and numerous ideologies that accompany these activities. There is also an interesting cognitive perspective of how data were and are conceptualized, produced and used both in the tradition of documentary film and in the domain of applied data visualizations. The second approach problematizes the tension between the sublime and the anti-sublime, as two opposing (although very often complementary in individual implementations) epistemic attitudes, which in data visualization research have been used as a tool for typologizing practices, but also as concepts capturing the transgressive value of visual representations of large scale data repositories.