Beautiful Visualization: Looking at Data through the Eyes of Experts

Visualization is the graphic presentation of data — portrayals meant to reveal complex information at a glance. Think of the familiar map of the New York City subway system, or a diagram of the human brain. Successful visualizations are beautiful not only for their aesthetic design, but also for elegant layers of detail that efficiently generate insight and new understanding.

This book examines the methods of two dozen visualization experts who approach their projects from a variety of perspectives — as artists, designers, commentators, scientists, analysts, statisticians, and more. Together they demonstrate how visualization can help us make sense of the world.

• Explore the importance of storytelling with a simple visualization exercise
• Learn how color conveys information that our brains recognize before we’re fully aware of it
• Discover how the books we buy and the people we associate with reveal clues to our deeper selves
• Recognize a method to the madness of air travel with a visualization of civilian air traffic
• Find out how researchers investigate unknown phenomena, from initial sketches to published papers

Contributors include:

Nick Bilton,Michael E. Driscoll,Jonathan Feinberg,Danyel Fisher,Jessica Hagy,Gregor Hochmuth,Todd Holloway,Noah Iliinsky,Eddie Jabbour,Valdean Klump,Aaron Koblin,Robert Kosara,Valdis Krebs,JoAnn Kuchera-Morin et al.,Andrew Odewahn,Adam Perer,Anders Persson,Maximilian Schich,Matthias Shapiro,Julie Steele,Moritz Stefaner,Jer Thorp,Fernanda Viegas,Martin Wattenberg,and Michael Young.

Table of Contents

Chapter One: On Beauty
Chapter Two: Once Upon a Stacked Time Series
Chapter Three: Wordle
Chapter Four: Color: The Cinderella of Data Visualization
Chapter Five: Mapping Information: Redesigning the New York City Subway Map
Chapter Six: Flight Patterns: A Deep Dive
Chapter Seven: Your Choices Reveal Who You Are: Mining and Visualizing
Chapter Eight: Visualizing the U.S. Senate Social Graph (1991–2009)
Chapter Nine: The Big Picture:
Chapter Ten: Finding Beautiful Insights in the Chaos of Social Network Visualizations
Chapter Eleven: Beautiful History: Visualizing Wikipedia
Chapter Twelve: Turning a Table into a Tree: Growing Parallel Sets into a Purposeful Project
Chapter Thirteen: The Design of “X by Y”
Chapter Fourteen: Revealing Matrices
Chapter Fifteen: This Was 1994:
Chapter Sixteen: A Day in the Life of the New York Times
Chapter Seventeen: Immersed in Unfolding Complex Systems
Chapter Eighteen: Postmortem Visualization:
Chapter Nineteen: Animation for Visualization: Opportunities and Drawbacks
Chapter Twenty: Visualization: Indexed.