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Index
Preface
Chapter One
On Beauty
What Is Beauty?
Novel
Informative
Efficient
Aesthetic
Learning from the Classics
The Periodic Table of the Elements
The London Underground Map
Other Subway Maps and Periodic Tables Are Weak Imitations
How Do We Achieve Beauty?
Step Outside Default Formats
Make It Informative
Make It Efficient
Leverage the Aesthetics
Putting It Into Practice
Conclusion
Chapter Two
Once Upon a Stacked Time Series
Question + Visual Data + Context = Story
Steps for Creating an Effective Visualization
Formulate the Question
Gather the Data
Apply a Visual Representation
Hands-on Visualization Creation
Data Tasks
Formulating the Question
Applying the Visual Presentation
Building the Visual
Conclusion
Chapter Three
Wordle
Wordle’s Origins
Anatomy of a Tag Cloud
Filling a Two-Dimensional Space
How Wordle Works
Text Analysis
Layout
Is Wordle Good Information Visualization?
Word Sizing Is Naïve
Color Is Meaningless
Fonts Are Fanciful
Word Count Is Not Specific Enough
How Wordle Is Actually Used
Using Wordle for Traditional Infovis
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Chapter Four
Color: The Cinderella of Data Visualization
Why Use Color in Data Graphics?
1. Vary Your Plotting Symbols
2. Use Small Multiples on a Canvas
3. Add Color to Your Data
So Why Bother with Color?
If Color Is Three-Dimensional, Can I Encode Three Dimensions with It?
Luminosity As a Means of Recovering Local Density
Looking Forward: What About Animation?
Methods
Conclusion
References and Further Reading
Chapter Five
Mapping Information: Redesigning the New York City Subway Map
The Need for a Better Tool
London Calling
New York Blues
Better Tools Allow for Better Tools
Size Is Only One Factor
Looking Back to Look Forward
New York’s Unique Complexity
Geography Is About Relationships
Include the Essentials
Leave Out the Clutter
Coloring Inside the Lines
Sweat the Small Stuff
Try It On
Users Are Only Human
A City of Neighborhoods
One Size Does Not Fit All
Conclusion
Chapter Six
Flight Patterns: A Deep Dive
Techniques and Data
Color
Motion
Anomalies and Errors
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Chapter Seven
Your Choices Reveal Who You Are: Mining and Visualizing Social Patterns
Early Social Graphs
Social Graphs of Amazon Book Purchasing Data
Determining the Network Around a Particular Book
Putting the Results to Work
Social Networks of Political Books
Conclusion
References
Chapter Eight
Visualizing the U.S. Senate Social Graph (1991–2009)
Building the Visualization
Gathering the Raw Data
Computing the Voting Affinity Matrix
Visualizing the Data with GraphViz
The Story That Emerged
What Makes It Beautiful?
And What Makes It Ugly?
Labels
Orientation
Party Affiliation
Conclusion
References
Chapter Nine
The Big Picture: Search and Discovery
The Visualization Technique
YELLOWPAGES.COM
Query Logs
Categorical Similarity
Visualization As a Substrate for Analytics
The Visualization
Advantages and Disadvantages of the Technique
The Netflix Prize
Preference Similarity
Labeling
Closer Looks
Creating Your Own
Conclusion
References
Chapter Ten
Finding Beautiful Insights in the Chaos of Social Network Visualizations
Visualizing Social Networks
Who Wants to Visualize Social Networks?
The Design of SocialAction
Case Studies: From Chaos to Beauty
The Social Network of Senatorial Voting
The Social Network of Terrorists
References
Chapter Eleven
Beautiful History: Visualizing Wikipedia
Depicting Group Editing
The Data
History Flow: Visualizing Edit Histories
Age of Edit
Authorship
Individual Authors
History Flow in Action
Communicating the Results
Chromogram: Visualizing One Person at a Time
Showing All the Data
What We Saw
Analyzing the Data
Conclusion
Chapter Twelve
Turning a Table into a Tree: Growing Parallel Sets into a Purposeful Project
Categorical Data
Parallel Sets
Visual Redesign
A New Data Model
The Database Model
Growing the Tree
Parallel Sets in the Real World
Conclusion
References
Chapter Thirteen
The Design of “X by Y”
Briefing and Conceptual Directions
Understanding the Data Situation
Exploring the Data
First Visual Drafts
The Visual Principle
The Final Product
All Submissions
By Prize
By Category
By Country
By Year
By Year and Category
Exhibition
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Chapter Fourteen
Revealing Matrices
The More, the Better?
Databases As Networks
Data Model Definition Plus Emergence
Network Dimensionality
The Matrix Macroscope
Reducing for Complexity
Further Matrix Operations
The Refined Matrix
Scaling Up
Further Applications
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Chapter Fifteen
This Was 1994: Data Exploration with the NYTimes Article Search API
Getting Data: The Article Search API
Managing Data: Using Processing
Three Easy Steps
Faceted Searching
Making Connections
Conclusion
Chapter Sixteen
A Day in the Life of the New York Times
Collecting Some Data
Let’s Clean ’Em First
Python, Map/Reduce, and Hadoop
The First Pass at the Visualization
Processing
The Underlay Map
Now, Where’s That Data We Just Processed?
Scene 1, Take 1
No Scale
No Sense of Time
Time-Lapse
Scene 1, Take 2
Let’s Run This Thing and See What Happens!
The Second Pass at the Visualization
Back to That Scale Problem
Massaging the Data Some More
The New Data Format
Visual Scale and Other Visualization Optimizations
Getting the Time Lapse Working
Semiautomating
Math for Rendering Time-Lapse Video
So, What Do We Do with This Thing?
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Chapter Seventeen
Immersed in Unfolding Complex Systems
Our Multimodal Arena
Our Roadmap to Creative Thinking
Beauty and Symmetry
The Computational Medium
Interpretation As a Filter
Project Discussion
Allobrain
Artificial Nature
Hydrogen Bond
Hydrogen Atom
Hydrogen Atom with Spin
Coherent Precession of Electron Spin
Conclusion
References
Chapter Eighteen
Postmortem Visualization: The Real Gold Standard
Background
Impact on Forensic Work
The Virtual Autopsy Procedure
Data Acquisition
Visualization: Image Analysis
Objective Documentation
Advantages and Disadvantages of Virtual Autopsy
The Future for Virtual Autopsies
Conclusion
References and Suggested Reading
Chapter Nineteen
Animation for Visualization: Opportunities and Drawbacks
Principles of Animation
Animation in Scientific Visualization
Learning from Cartooning
The Downsides of Animation
GapMinder and Animated Scatterplots
Testing Animated Scatterplots
Presentation Is Not Exploration
Types of Animation
Dynamic Data, Animated Recentering
A Taxonomy of Animations
Staging Animations with DynaVis
Principles of Animation
Conclusion: Animate or Not?
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
References
Chapter Twenty
Visualization: Indexed.
Visualization: It’s an Elephant.
Visualization: It’s Art.
Visualization: It’s Business.
Visualization: It’s Timeless.
Visualization: It’s Right Now.
Visualization: It’s Coded.
Visualization: It’s Clear.
Visualization: It’s Learnable.
Visualization: It’s a Buzzword.
Visualization: It’s an Opportunity.
Contributors
Colophon
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