Every chapter in this book has made use of visualization in some way, primarily using Incanter. Incanter is an effective tool to produce a wide variety of charts as we work, and these are often the ones we'll reach out for first while trying to understand a dataset. This initial phase is often called exploratory data analysis and, at this stage, we're interested in summarizing statistics such as the distribution of numerical data, the counts of the categorical data, and how the attributes in our data are correlated.

Having found a meaningful way to interpret data, we'll often want to communicate it to others. One of the most important tools for communication is visualization, and we may be required to convey subtle or complicated ideas to people without a strong analytical background. In this chapter, we'll use the library Quil—which grew out of software...