Different pieces of data afford different visualizations. When you want to show a timeline, you rarely build a vertical bar chart. You would more likely use a horizontal line chart. You should, of course, give yourself some freedom of expression when encoding data to position, shape, or color. However, the data at hand, the meaning you want to convey, and the cognitive decoding processes at play are important guides when deciding how to encode your data.
In this chapter, we will focus on a specific map-visualization technique: hexagonal binning maps (hexbin maps). We will start with a brief journey through various map visualization techniques before focusing on hexbin maps. You will learn the conceptual and cognitive benefits of hexbin maps, what hexagons are useful for in comparison to other shapes, and how they are calculated.
Most of the...