Writing

Numbers Hurt

Oww, my data.

stocks_329__1229362245_6462.jpg

(Originally found on Boston.com, credited only to Reuters… If anyone knows where to find a larger version or the original, please drop me a line. Update – Paul St. Amant and Martin Wattenberg have also pointed out The Brokers With Hands On Their Faces Blog, which is also evocative, yet wildly entertaining, but not as data-centric as The Brokers With Tales Of Sadness Depicted On Multiple Brightly Colored Yet Highly Detailed Computer Displays in the Background Behind Them Blog that I’ve just started.)

Monday, December 15, 2008 | displays, news  
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.