Writing

Cracks in the Guggenheim

Beautiful info graphic from a September 2007 article about the restoration of the Guggenheim, depicting the cracks in the concrete walls. From the image:

Since the Guggenheim Museum opened in 1959, Frank Lloyd Wright’s massive spiral facade has been showing signs of cracking, mainly from seasonal temperature fluctuations that caus the concrete walls, built without expansion joints, to contract and expand.

The image is partly striking for the contrast between the NYT-style geometric graphic and pale colors mixed with the organic shape of the cracks. Wonderful.

guggenheim-520.jpg

Sent from one of my former students at CMU (you know who you are, drop me a line if it was you…I’ve lost the original message!)

Tuesday, March 4, 2008 | infographics  
Book

Visualizing Data Book CoverVisualizing Data is my 2007 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. When first published, it was the only book(s) for people who wanted to learn how to actually build a data visualization in code.

The text was published by O’Reilly in December 2007 and can be found at Amazon and elsewhere. Amazon also has an edition for the Kindle, for people who aren’t into the dead tree thing. (Proceeds from Amazon links found on this page are used to pay my web hosting bill.)

Examples for the book can be found here.

The book covers ideas found in my Ph.D. dissertation, which is the basis for Chapter 1. The next chapter is an extremely brief introduction to Processing, which is used for the examples. Next is (chapter 3) is a simple mapping project 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 is used for follow-up code and writing about related topics.