Visual Insights: A Practical Guide to Making Sense of Data by Katy Börner (7-Mar-2014) Paperback

by Katy Börner

In the age of Big Data, the tools of information visualization offer us a macroscope to help us make sense of the avalanche of data available on every subject. This book offers a gentle introduction to the design of insightful information visualizations. It is the only book on the subject that teaches nonprogrammers how to use open code and open data to design insightful visualizations. Readers will learn to apply advanced data mining and visualization techniques to make sense of temporal, geospatial, topical, and network data. The book, developed for use in an information visualization MOOC, covers data analysis algorithms that enable extraction of patterns and trends in data, with chapters devoted to "when" (temporal data), "where" (geospatial data), "what" (topical data), and "with whom" (networks and trees); and to systems that drive research and development. Examples of projects undertaken for clients include an interactive visualization of the success of game player activity in " World of Warcraft"; a visualization of 311 number adoption that shows the diffusion of non-emergency calls in the United States; a return on investment study for two decades of HIV/AIDS research funding by NIAID; and a map showing the impact of the HiveNYC Learning Network. "Visual Insights" will be an essential resource on basic information visualization techniques for scholars in many fields, students, designers, or anyone who works with data.

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology

Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Katy Börner (born 1967 in Leipzig, Germany) is an engineer, scholar, author, educator, and speaker specializing in data analysis and visualization, particularly in the areas of science and technology (S&T) studies and biomedical applications. Based out of Indiana University, Bloomington, Börner is the Victor Yngve Distinguished Professor of Engineering & Information Science in the Department of Intelligent Systems Engineering and the Department of Information and Library Science at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering and a member of the Core Cognitive Science Faculty. Since 2012, she has also held the position of visiting professor at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands,[1] and in 2017-2019, she was a Humboldt Fellow at Dresden University of Technology, Germany.

Börner is the founding director of the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center, an organization dedicated to the study, development, and promotion of tools and services for the analysis and visualization of large-scale networks, particularly in the areas of biomedical, social, and behavioral science, physics, and technology.[2] She is also the curator of the international Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit, a collection of science maps and macroscope tools that seeks to educate the general public about science mapping and empower individuals to create their own data visualizations.[3]

In 2015, she was appointed to a two-year term as member of the U.S. Department of Commerce's Data Advisory Council.[4] Since October 2018, she has served as a Trustee of the Institute for Pure & Applied Mathematics (IPAM), NSF Math Institute at UCLA.[5]

Reviews

[Jenny · Rating 2 out of 5]

This textbook was somewhat helpful, but I found that it relied too heavily on jargon ("burstiness" is a technical term, apparently). It used extremely complex examples of superb data visualizations that very well may be excellent, but their presentation in this book rendered many of them either too small to read or lost too much in the center binding. It was intriguing in some respects, but it was also frequently confusing.