Beautiful Visualization: Looking at Data Through the Eyes of Experts

by Julie Steele, Noah Iliinsky

Visualization is the graphic presentation of data -- portrayals meant to reveal complex information at a glance. Think of the familiar map of the New York City subway system, or a diagram of the human brain. Successful visualizations are beautiful not only for their aesthetic design, but also for elegant layers of detail that efficiently generate insight and new understanding.This book examines the methods of two dozen visualization experts who approach their projects from a variety of perspectives -- as artists, designers, commentators, scientists, analysts, statisticians, and more. Together they demonstrate how visualization can help us make sense of the world.Explore the importance of storytelling with a simple visualization exerciseLearn how color conveys information that our brains recognize before we're fully aware of itDiscover how the books we buy and the people we associate with reveal clues to our deeper selvesRecognize a method to the madness of air travel with a visualization of civilian air trafficFind out how researchers investigate unknown phenomena, from initial sketches to published papersContributors Bilton, Michael E. Driscoll, Jonathan Feinberg, Danyel Fisher, Jessica Hagy, Gregor Hochmuth, Todd Holloway, Noah Iliinsky, Eddie Jabbour, Valdean Klump, Aaron Koblin, Robert Kosara, Valdis Krebs, JoAnn Kuchera-Morin et al., Andrew Odewahn, Adam Perer, Anders Persson, Maximilian Schich, Matthias Shapiro, Julie Steele, Moritz Stefaner, Jer Thorp, Fernanda Viegas, Martin Wattenberg, and Michael Young.

Genres: Design, Nonfiction, Technology, Reference, Programming, Technical, Computer Science

418 pages, ebook

Published April 23, 2010

Reviews

[Michael Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

TODO full review:
+ Interesting collection of modern techniques for inforamtion visualization. Good anthology, but a bit thin on contribution.
+ Noah Iliinsky's Chapter 1, On Beauty: 4/5. Good theory of what makes information visualization results beautiful (a combination of aesthetics, efficiency, and usefulness). Very good examples of both beautiful and not beautiful (ugly?) visualizations.
+ Matthias Shapiro's Chapter 2, Once Upon a Stacked Time Series: 2/5. About the stages of creating a good information visualization. Cite's Ben Fry's approach, introduced in Beautiful Data: acquire, parse, filter, represent, refine, and interact. Proposes a story-driven visualization, where a question drives the data, aided by context.
+ Jonathan Feinberg, Chapter 3, Wordle: 5/5. An inventive type of graph that got plenty of good treatment and could even be used to present bios and topics and textual exchanges informally. Good mix of theory, practical use, and technical detail.
+ Michael Driscoll's Chapter 4, on Color: 1/5. Not a good introduction or set of examples. Better check directly ColorBrewer and the theory behind it, or the classics of Colin Ware (2000s).
+ Eddie Jobbur, Chapter 5, Mapping - Redesigning the New York City's Subway Map: 5/5. Excellent discussion about the history and current practice of mapping applied to subways, and a very good attempt to redesign a challenging subway map.
+ Aaron Koblin, Chapter 6, on representing flight patterns: 4/5. Introduces Flight Patterns.
+ Valdis Krebs, Chapter 7, about social graphs: 1/5. Very basic material and unclear visualizations (why make the graphs planar, if the space between has no meaning?! why make lines thicker, if there is no way to explain the actual values in the quantified information?! etc.)
+ Andrew Odewahn, Chapter 8, on visualizing the US Senate's social graph: 2/5. Good visualization and good analysis. No complete examples, no examples derived or analyzed from the large series printed by the New York Times or Washington post at the time.
+ Todd Holloway, Chapter 9, visualization of (not for) search and discovery: 3/5. Good analysis, good software, but collaborative filtering could get more detail.
+ Adam Perer, Chapter 10, social network visualizations: 3/5. Nice tools, important topics. Not sure these tools have helped identify something useful thus far.
+ Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas, Chapter 11, visualizing knowledge (Wikipedia): 5/5. Introduces history flow diagrams, with authorship expressed as color. Includes versions over time, examples of vandalism (full-page deletions). Chromograms to visualize single-user edits. Helped identify bots.
+ Robert Kosara, Chapter 12, on the redesign of a visualization tool, Parallel Sets: 2/5. Ok, just not very interesting as report on either visualization or software refactoring.
+ Moritz Stefaner, Chapter 13, a visualization of historical entries in the Prix Ars Electronica (1987-2009): 5/5. Excellent project to visualize multi-dimensional, historical data.
+ Maximilian Schich, Chapter 14, Revealing Matrices: 5/5. Visualizes the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance (Germany, operational since 1947), first against the initial data model, then against various refinements. Good example of project where exploring the data can lead to architectural changes in the data model (in Germany, no less!).
+ Jer Thorp, Chapter 15, exploring one year of NYTimes articles: 3/5. Primarily code-related, but presents interesting graphs and a tool to make them.
+ Michael Young and Nick Bilton, Chapter 16, exploring the readers of the New York Times, for one day: 2/5. (Privacy infringement?) Visualizes data for millions of visitors. Python and Hadoop get honorary mentions (feels like so late-2000s). Kinda obvious graphs.
+ Putnam et al., Chapter 17, visualizing complex systems: 4/5. Notions of VR and immersive 3D experiences, put to test in the AlloSphere lab. Always impressive, always difficult to figure out the novelty or quality in 2D print.
+ Anders Persson, Chapter 18, medical information visualization, focusing on post-mortems: 1/5. Shudders. Looks like Sniper Elite 2/3 (there's a 4 out there, and it looks better). If you think the mention of video games is callous, so is throwing 2D pictures of human and horse cadavers inside a book about beautiful visualization that so far has floated in optimistic vibes.
+ Danyel Fisher, Chapter 19, animated visualization: 2/5. Animated scatterplots? Check. Animated small multiples? Check. Animated depictions of hierarchical file systems (in GTV)? Check. Bar to donut charts animations? Check (but ... why?!)
+ Jessica Hagy, Chapter 20, interesting visualization masquerading as funny and cuddly doodles: 3/5. Good counterpoint to the horrors of Chapter 18. Too few counterpoints, though.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of papers for people who want to GET WORK DONE.

[John Orman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This O'Reilly book starts off with a discussion of "What is Beauty?"

A question + visualization data + context = a story.

An example of beautiful visualization is Wordle, the textual analysis tool. The visualization of social patterns through social graphs is another example, such as visualizing Wikipedia's complex structures of document edit history. Virtual autopsies!

The Netflix Prize is a million dollar reward for anyone who could improve the movie rental company's recommendation algorithm by 10%. Some references to free analytical/graphic software are given, such as
Shawn Martin's DrL software:
http://cs.sandia.gov/~smartin/softwar... and
Graphical Visualization:
http://graphviz.org

Some examples of visualization are shown at the Places and Spaces online exhibit at http://scimaps.org/maps/browse

Since I have done some work on complex network analysis applied to terrorist groups, the section on the Social Networks of Terrorists study sponsored by the Dept. of Homeland Security was of interest to me. The important contacts in sinister groups can be deduced through graphical analysis of email, text messages, phone calls, and other communications data.

[লোচন · Rating 4 out of 5]

মাথার ওপর দিয়া যাওয়ার মত বই। আমি পাইথন বলতে অজগর বুঝি, hadoop শুনলে মেন্টাল ইমেজ ভাইসা উঠে যে এক লোক বিশাল হ্যাডমের সাথে ডুব দিতাছে পানিতে; প্রোগ্রামিংয়ের ক্ষেত্রে অভিজ্ঞতা আইসিটি টিউশনি করানের সূত্রে বড়জোর হ্যালো ওয়ার্ল্ড পর্যন্ত। আমারে দিয়া এই বইয়ের প্রকৃত মূল্যায়ন করানি অসম্ভব।

তবে, ব্যাপারটা হইলো কী, কৌতূহল।

সেই কৌতূহল মিটাইতে গিয়া অনেকগুলা সুন্দর জিনিস পাইলাম। বিউটি, মানে সৌন্দর্য কি জিনিস, সেইটা নিয়া আরিস্তঁতল লেভেলের বস্তুবাদি আলাপ। ওয়ার্ডল কীভাবে তৈয়ারি হইছে, এর ভিতরের কলকবজা কেমন। সাবওয়ে ম্যাপ বানানের উপায়। সোশাল নেটওয়ার্কগুলারে দৃষ্টিজন্ম দেওয়ার পদ্ধতি। এইগুলা সব যে বুঝছি তা ঘুণাক্ষরেও দাবি করি না। কিন্তু একটা আইডিয়া পাইছি৷ পুস্তক পাঠে খরচা সময় এইখানেই উসুল।

আর সবচে চমৎকার চ্যাপ্টার ছিল ‘আ ডে ইন দা লাইফ অফ দা নিউ ইয়র্ক টাইমস’। তথ্য সংগ্রহ করে সেটারে স্ক্রিপ্ট প্লে করে ঝেড়েঝুড়ে প্রস্তুত করলেন, ম্যাপের ওপরে সেই প্রস্তুত তথ্যের কলম লাগাইলেন, সময় অবস্থান ভেদে আলাদা অক্ষ বিভাগায়ন হইল, তারপর আপনে পেপারের একটা আর্টিকেলের সাথে গ্রাফিক্সরূপে, লেজুড় হিসাবে এই জিনিসটা জুড়ে দিতে পারেন।

আর আমি এদ্দিন ভাবতাম এক্সেলেই বোধহয় সব করা যায়। ah, my sweet summer child!

যাজ্ঞা। বই পড়ে ভাল্লাগছে।

[Manuel Frias · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of articles about data visualization written 11 years ago. This fact makes that, in my opinion, most of them have not aged well because it mentions technologies that have died and been buried long time ago (Flash! Silverlight!).

Probably, the ones I liked most was the one about the meaning of beauty, about the remake of the NY subway map and about the definition of visualization.

[Vladimir · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good compilation, nice perspectives from the experts of the visualization. Yet, most of the examples are too academic and not very much applicable to industry.

[Renae · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insightful and knowledgeable

[Wai Yip Tung · Rating 4 out of 5]

A series of chapters tackling diverse topics of visualization. Some talk about idea, some are more hands on, some are theoretical, some teach you the process and some I don't understand well. My favor chapters include visualizing Wikipedia, a chapter on the full creative and analytic journey to create a visualization for the database of Prix Ars Electronica (The Design of X by Y), and also the visualization idea of Parallel Set.

One thing is I learned is data visualization is inseparable from data analysis. It is not like so call "infographics", which primary focus on visuals.

To O'Reilly editor, please put the authors' bio in front of the chapter. Is it huge hassle to look up a list order by last name at the end of the book.

[Greg Stoll · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book had some very cool visualizations. It left me a little unsatisfied...I guess what I really wanted was some code to get started, but instead most chapters only vaguely discussed how to make their visualization. But if you're just looking for cool visualizations, this is the book for you! (minus the last two or three chapters)

Also, the book is quite expensive as it's full color throughout. Paper copy, available for borrowing.

[Nathanael Coyne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of short essays and case studies by two dozen data visualisation experts; it really is beautiful. Not instructional like Stephen Few's Now You See It, but inspiring and great for ideas on where and how you can apply data viz. My favourite has to be flight paths as 3D geospatial data viz is a particular interest of mine, and they're just so pretty!

Also, all author royalties go to Architecture for Humanity, which is really cool.

[Damien Leri · Rating 1 out of 5]

intro/basic info, and comprised of hyper-specific stories.

[Dgg32 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good book interesting themes, especially a chapter about postmortem visualization: never thought that CSI and visualization can be together.

[Tkelleyireland · Rating 3 out of 5]

good primer on data pattern simplification from experts. more technique practicals would have been great. enjoyed social network analysis bits

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This series of books is really interesting. The breadth of perspectives on what makes a visualization beautiful is as instructive as an in depth study of how to make any kind of visualization.

[John Terning · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of the contributed chapters were very interesting.

[Xovee Xu · Rating 3 out of 5]

一本由二十篇短文组成的书，有些很有趣，不过由于翻译或者表达之类的问题，观感并不太好。