Visualize This : The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics

by Yau, Nathan

• ISBN13: 9780470944882
• ISBN10: 0470944889
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-07-20
• Publisher: Wiley

Summary

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, etc 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.

Author Biography

Nathan Yau is a PhD 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.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. xv
Telling Stories with Data	p. 1
More Than Numbers	p. 2
What to Look For	p. 8
Design	p. 13
Wrapping Up	p. 20
Handling Data	p. 21
Gather Data	p. 22
Formatting Data	p. 38
Wrapping Up	p. 52
Choosing Tools to Visualize Data	p. 53
Out-of-the-Box Visualization	p. 54
Programming	p. 62
Illustration	p. 76
Mapping	p. 80
Survey Your Options	p. 88
Wrapping Up	p. 89
Visualizing Patterns over Time	p. 91
What to Look for over Time	p. 92
Discrete Points in Time	p. 93
Continuous Data	p. 118
Wrapping Up	p. 132
Visualizing Proportions	p. 135
What to Look for in Proportions	p. 136
Parts of a Whole	p. 136
Proportions over Time	p. 161
Wrapping Up	p. 178
Visualizing Relationships	p. 179
What Relationships to Look For	p. 180
Correlation	p. 180
Distribution	p. 200
Comparison	p. 213
Wrapping Up	p. 226
Spotting Differences	p. 227
What to Look For	p. 228
Companing across Multiple Variables	p. 228
Reducing Dimensions	p. 258
Searching for Outliers	p. 265
Wrapping Up	p. 269
Visualizing Spatial Relationships	p. 271
What to Look For	p. 272
Specific Locations	p. 272
Regions	p. 285
Over Space and Time	p. 302
Wrapping Up	p. 325
Designing with a Purpose	p. 327
Prepare Yourself	p. 328
Prepare Your Readers	p. 330
Visual Cues	p. 334
Good Visualization	p. 340
Wrapping Up	p. 341
Index	p. 343
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