Writing

Goodbye red background, farewell imposing text blocks

I’m in the midst of rolling out a web site redesign. The former site (un)design was assembled just after finishing my Ph.D. I expected it to be bad enough to force myself to make a proper site. Three and a half years passed, with even friends who weren’t designers (including my future mother-in-law) taking exception. The redesign was done by my friend Eugene Kuo, who couldn’t deal with it any longer.

I’m currently building out the design and hooking up all the pages (including a handful of projects that weren’t linked before). The navigation at the top will slowly begin to work as this process continues. For instance, the “projects” link currently points to my old site, which is missing anything I’ve done in the past four years. The big images on the home page will soon be rotating through projects, while the new projects page will provide a better visual overview of what’s inside.

At any rate, thanks to Eugene and keep an eye out…

Wednesday, March 5, 2008 | site  
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.