Practical data design tips from a data visualization expert of the modern age
Data doesn’t decrease; it is ever-increasing and can be overwhelming to organize in a way that makes sense to its intended audience. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could actually visualize data in such a way that we could maximize its potential and tell a story in a clear, concise manner? Thanks to the creative genius of Nathan Yau, we can. With this full-color book, data visualization guru and author Nathan Yau uses step-by-step tutorials to show you how to visualize and tell stories with data. He explains how to gather, parse, and format data and then design high quality graphics that help you explore and present patterns, outliers, and relationships.
* Presents a unique approach to visualizing and telling stories with data, from a data visualization expert and the creator of flowingdata.com, Nathan Yau
* Offers step-by-step tutorials and practical design tips for creating statistical graphics, geographical maps, and information design to find meaning in the numbers
* Details tools that can be used to visualize data-native graphics for the Web, such as Action Script, Flash libraries, PHP, and Java Script and tools to design graphics for print, such as R and Illustrator
* Contains numerous examples and descriptions of patterns and outliers and explains how to show them
Visualize This demonstrates how to explain data visually so that you can present your information in a way that is easy to understand and appealing.
Table of Content
Introduction xv
1 Telling Stories with Data 1
More Than Numbers 2
What to Look For 8
Design 13
Wrapping Up 20
2 Handling Data 21
Gather Data 22
Formatting Data 38
Wrapping Up 52
3 Choosing Tools to Visualize Data 53
Out-of-the-Box Visualization 54
Programming 62
Illustration 76
Mapping 80
Survey Your Options 88
Wrapping Up 89
4 Visualizing Patterns over Time 91
What to Look for over Time 92
Discrete Points in Time 93
Continuous Data 118
Wrapping Up 132
5 Visualizing Proportions 135
What to Look for in Proportions 136
Parts of a Whole 136
Proportions over Time 161
Wrapping Up 178
6 Visualizing Relationships 179
What Relationships to Look For 180
Correlation 180
Distribution 200
Comparison 213
Wrapping Up 226
7 Spotting Differences 227
What to Look For 228
Comparing across Multiple Variables 228
Reducing Dimensions 258
Searching for Outliers 265
Wrapping Up 269
8 Visualizing Spatial Relationships 271
What to Look For 272
Specific Locations 272
Regions 285
Over Space and Time 302
Wrapping Up 325
9 Designing with a Purpose 327
Prepare Yourself 328
Prepare Your Readers 330
Visual Cues 334
Good Visualization 340
Wrapping Up 341
Index 343
About the author
Nathan Yau is a Ph D candidate in Statistics at UCLA and a lifelong data junkie. His goal is to make data available and useful to those who aren’t necessarily data experts, and he focuses on data visualization and personal data collection. You can follow his visualization experiments at http://flowingdata.com.
More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
2,799 Ebooks in this category
