Writing
Book
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. 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 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.
Recent posts
- Processing 2.0 alpha 3 released
- Processing 0195 now posted
- And speaking of height...
- The importance of showing numbers in context
- Come work with us in Boston
- Minnesota, meet Physics
- Two day visualization course at Harvard
- The growth of the Processing project
- Processing + Eclipse
- When you spend your life doing news graphics...
Archives
- November 2011
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- February 2008
As seen on Twitter
- Always makes me giggle to see the phrase “aesthetic appeal” used scientific papers (proxy for “we thought it was pretty” or “looked cool”) 2012-09-17
- @andybak They don't have an answer. If bzfileids.dat gets larger than 1GB, you'll have to uninstall, reinstall, & restart from scratch. 2012-09-10
- @L05_ @codeanticode this is not an appropriate place for bug reports. 2012-09-08
- @vhgalvao @processing_org @REAS documentation is in revisions.txt in the meantime. 2012-09-05
- @arctic_sunrise @alignedleft @REAS just a server config issue I need to fix with the new beta update. 2012-09-05
- After a promising start, very disappointed with @backblaze... Too many files corrupts backup w/o warning; now patronizing customer support. 2012-09-04
- @novalsi I think they're all backwards-compatible, but several can be simplified based on additions to the language. 2012-09-04
- Processing 2.0 beta 1 has arrived! http://t.co/jtgijsJ3 and the damage here: http://t.co/jGRH5ZSN 2012-09-04
- @cheesedeath nah, oddly enough it worked without any changes 2012-08-30
- (...bonus points if you misread "think C" as a reference "Lightspeed C"...) 2012-08-30
- More updates...