Writing

Awesome now travels by poster tube

A few weeks ago I received a note from Ed Fries, who was interested in a distellamap-style print of his recently-finished Halo 2600.

Halo? Like the Xbox game by Bungie?

Why, yes! Sure enough, he’s written a version of the game for he Atari 2600.

You can play the game here, and if you don’t drown in the awesome (or die from laughing), you can now purchase prints here. Like the other distellamap prints, it shows how the image and code data coexist and interact inside an Atari 2600 cartridge games:

with all new colors!

A detail of what it looks like up close:

grab the key!

(And as with the other prints, proceeds are given to charity.)

Saturday, September 4, 2010 | distellamap, prints  
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.