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)

Visual Cues

In Chapter 1, “Telling Stories with Data,” you saw how encodings work. Basically, you have data, and that data is encoded by geometry, color, or animation. Readers then decode those shapes, shades, and movement, mapping them back to numbers. This is the foundation of visualization. Encoding is a visual translation. Decoding helps you see data from a different angle and find patterns that you otherwise would not have seen if you looked only at the data in a table or a spreadsheet.

These encodings are usually straightforward because they are based on mathematical rules. Longer bars represent higher values, and smaller circles represent smaller values. Although your computer makes a lot of decisions during this process, it’s still up to you to pick encodings appropriate for the dataset at hand.

Through all the examples in previous chapters, you’ve seen how good design not only lends to aesthetics, but also makes graphics easier to read and can change...