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.

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Visualize This
Nathan Yau‚ÄØ
Jul, 2011 | 384 pages
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Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Cover
Cover
2
Contents
Contents
3
Chapter 1: Telling Stories with Data
Chapter 1: Telling Stories with Data
More Than Numbers
What to Look For
Design
Wrapping Up
4
Chapter 2: Handling Data
Chapter 2: Handling Data
Gather Data
Formatting Data
Wrapping Up
5
Chapter 3: Choosing Tools to Visualize Data
Chapter 3: Choosing Tools to Visualize Data
Out-of-the-Box Visualization
Programming
Illustration
Mapping
Survey Your Options
Wrapping Up
6
Chapter 4: Visualizing Patterns over Time
Chapter 4: Visualizing Patterns over Time
What to Look for over Time
Discrete Points in Time
Continuous Data
Wrapping Up
7
Chapter 5: Visualizing Proportions
Chapter 5: Visualizing Proportions
What to Look for in Proportions
Parts of a Whole
Proportions over Time
Wrapping Up
8
Chapter 6: Visualizing Relationships
Chapter 6: Visualizing Relationships
What Relationships to Look For
Correlation
Distribution
Comparison
Wrapping Up
9
Chapter 7: Spotting Differences
Chapter 7: Spotting Differences
What to Look For
Comparing across Multiple Variables
Reducing Dimensions
Searching for Outliers
Wrapping Up
10
Chapter 8: Visualizing Spatial Relationships
Chapter 8: Visualizing Spatial Relationships
What to Look For
Specific Locations
Regions
Over Space and Time
Wrapping Up
11
Chapter 9: Designing with a Purpose
Chapter 9: Designing with a Purpose
Prepare Yourself
Prepare Your Readers
Visual Cues
Good Visualization
Wrapping Up
12
Introduction
Introduction
Learning Data

Survey Your Options

This isn’t a comprehensive list of what you can use to visualize data, but it should be enough to get you started. There’s a lot to consider and play with here. The tools you end up using largely depend on what you want to accomplish, and there are always multiple ways to accomplish a single task, even within the same software. Want to design static data graphics? Maybe try R or Illustrator. Do you want to build an interactive tool for a web application? Try JavaScript or Flash.

On FlowingData, I ran a poll that asked people what they mainly used to analyze and visualize data. A little more than 1,000 people responded. The results are shown in Figure 3-29.

Figure 3-29: What FlowingData readers use to analyze and visualize data

f0329.tif

There are some obvious leaders, given the topic of FlowingData. Excel was first, and R followed in second. But after that, there was a variety of software picks. More than 200 people chose the Other category. In the comments...

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