Writing

LA’s Dirtiest Pools & More

39342283-01163012.jpgFeaturing “38 projects and more than 730,000 records,” the Los Angeles Times now has a Data Desk feature, a collection of searchable data sets and information graphics from recent publications. It’s like reading the LA Times online but only paying attention to the data-oriented features. (Boring? Appealing? Your ideal newspaper? We database, you decide. Eww, don’t repeat that.) On first glance I thought (hoped) it would be more raw data, but even having all the items collected in one location suggests something interesting for how newspapers share (and perceive, internally) their carefully researched (an massaged) data that they collect on a regular basis.

Thanks to Casey for the pointer.

Thursday, November 27, 2008 | data, 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.