Book Image

Visualize This

By : Nathan Yau‚ÄØ
Book Image

Visualize This

By: Nathan Yau‚ÄØ

Overview of this book

Visualize This is a guide on how to visualize and tell stories with data, providing practical design tips complemented with step-by-step tutorials. It begins with a description of the huge growth of data and visualization in industry, news, and gov't and opportunities for those who tell stories with data. Logically it moves on to actual stories in data-statistical ones with trends and human stories. the technical part comes up quickly with how to gather, parse and format data with Python, R, Excel, Google docs, and so on, and details tools to visualize data-native graphics for the Web like ActionScript, Flash libraries, PHP, JavaScript, CSS, HTML. Every chapter provides an example as well. Patterns over time and kinds of data charts are followed by proportions, chart types and examples. Next, examples and descriptions of outliers and how to show them, different kinds of maps, how to guide your readers and explain the data "in the visualization". The book ends with a value-add appendix on graphical perception.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Specific Locations

A list of locations is the easiest type of spatial data you’ll come across. You have the latitude and longitude for a bunch places, and you want to map them. Maybe you want to show where events, such as crime, occurred, or you want to find areas where points are clustered. This is straightforward to do, and there are a lot of ways to do it.

On the web, the most common way to map points is via Google or Microsoft Maps. Using their mapping APIs, you can have an interactive map that you can zoom and pan in no time with just a few lines of JavaScript. Tons of tutorials and excellent documentation are online on how to make use of these APIs, so I’ll leave that to you.

Note

Google and Microsoft provide super straightforward tutorials that start with their mapping APIs, so be sure to check those out if you’re interested in taking advantage of some basic mapping functionality.

However, there is a downside. You can only customize the maps so much, and...