Writing

PARSE show at the Axiom Gallery in Boston

New work! Sometime collaborator and savior of this site Eugene Kuo and I have developed a piece for the PARSE show opening tomorrow (Friday, March 27) at the Axiom Art Gallery in Boston. From the announcement:

Curated by AXIOM Founding Director, Heidi Kayser, PARSE, includes the work of five artists who use data to present new perspectives on the underlying information that makes us human. Overlooked patterns of data surround us daily. The artists in PARSE sort, separate and amalgamate physical, mental and social information to create intricate visualizations in print, interactive media, animation and sculpture. These pieces track and reflect our brainwaves during REM sleep, our genetic code, our social icons, and even our carnal desires.

syntenograph printFeaturing works by: Ben Fry and Eugene Kuo, Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, Jason Salavon, Jen Hall

The opening is from 6-9pm. The gallery location is amazing — it’s a nook to the side of the Green Street subway station (on the Orange Line in Boston) — it makes me think of what it might be like to have a show at the lair of Bill Murray’s character in Caddyshack. I love that it’s been reserved as a gallery space.

Martin & Fernanda are showing their Fleshmap project, along with a pair of amalgamations by Jason Salavon, and two sculptures from Jen Hall (hrm, can’t find a link for those). Our project is described here, and uses comparisons of the DNA between many species that have been the focus of my curiosity recently to make compositions like the one seen to the right.

Thursday, March 26, 2009 | iloveme  
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.