Visualizing Data is my book about computational information design. It covers the path from raw data to how we understand it, detailing how to begin with a set of numbers and produce images or software that lets you view and interact with information. Unlike nearly all books in this field, it is a hands-on guide intended for people who want to learn how to actually build a data visualization.

The text was published by O’Reilly in December 2007 and can be found at Amazon and elsewhere. People who have purchased the book can find the examples here.

The book covers ideas found in my Ph.D. dissertation, which is basis for Chapter 1. The next chapter is an extremely brief introduction to Processing, which is used for the examples. but applies them to a series of examples, first starting with a simple mapping project (Chapter 3) to place data points on a map of the United States. Of course, the idea is not that lots of people want to visualize data for each of 50 states. Instead, it’s a jumping off point for learning how to lay out data spatially.

The chapters that follow cover six more projects, such as salary vs. performance (Chapter 5), zipdecode (Chapter 6), followed by more advanced topics dealing with trees, treemaps, hierarchies, and recursion (Chapter 7), plus graphs and networks (Chapter 8).

This site will be used for follow-up code and writing about related topics.

• Is Processing a Language?
• Mapping Iran's Online Public
• Panicky Addition
• Mangled Tenets and Exasperation: the iTunes App Store
• Data as Dairy
• History of Predictive Text Swearing
• “Hello Kettle? Yeah, hi, this is the Pot calling.”
• The Importance of Failure
• More NASA Observations Acquire Interest
• NASA Observes Earth Blogs

• August 2008
• July 2008
• June 2008
• May 2008
• April 2008
• March 2008
• February 2008