Category: Visualization

Presentation Visualization

Beautiful Evidence by Edward Tufte

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

Edward Tufte’s books on data visualization are nothing short of legend among us information geeks. A political scientist by training, he demonstrates how well-conceived visualizations can effectively communicate insights and how shortcomings can create catastrophes. He continues his famous series on visual imagination with this book on the intersection of data and art. He shows how displays of evidence can move readers much like art and how poorly constructed displays can inhibit good judgment. Tufte’s…

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Research-Education Science Visualization

Analyzing Social Networks, 2nd Edition

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

With so much Internet data available through social media, social networks have entered the popular consciousness. They have long been used by social scientists to analyze complex research questions, so the theories are robust and tested by time. Still, many of us worry about reading about a technical topic that’s not in our traditional field, but this book proves accessible and engaging. It introduces the topic while exciting readers’ minds with relevant concepts that can…

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Psychology Software-Technology Visualization

Visual Thinking for Design

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

Colin Ware directs a Data Visualization Research Lab at the University of New Hampshire. His education is broad and interesting: He holds degrees both in computer science and the psychology of perception. He is a (the?) leading expert on integrating neuroscience and psychology with computer graphics. Most computer graphics books teach how to make things that look cool. This book takes a different tact and discusses why things look cool in terms of the brain’s…

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Software-Technology Visualization

Information Dashboard Design: Displaying data for at-a-glance monitoring

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

by Stephen Few(c) Copyright 2013. Dashboards are a hot topic in our information-laden world. They are imagined by those in the design world (often very poorly) and implemented by programmers who do not take their imagination any further. This book, written by an acknowledged expert in the field of visualization, describes how to design dashboards that communicate essential data to users, mostly business-people. As such, its audience consists of designers, not programmers. Although I am…

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Software-Technology Visualization

Mastering Gephi Network Visualization: Produce advanced network graphs in Gephi and gain valuable insights into your network datasets

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

by Ken ChervenCopyright (c) 2015. I fooled around with Gephi at work some months ago. It’s one of the leading options that handles Social Network Analysis, a field that is taking off due to seemingly ubiquitous datasets due to academic publishing and social media. This book teaches you the basics of what Gephi has to offer vis-a-vis this field. I found most interesting the idea of a temporally-based social network – i.e., one that grows…

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Visualization

Data Points: Visualization That Means Something

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

by Nathan Yau.(c) 2013 Data Points reads like a friendly textbook engaged with visualization. It is less concerned with tips and tricks, and more concerned with understanding. For instance, on the neverending debate on pie charts, Yau pleads neutrality. He sees that pie charts havetheir place, albeit a limited one, in the visualization domain. As such, he promotes freedom and the ability to choose above all. There are lots of data that need appropriate visualization in…

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Visualization

Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic(c) 2015 Back in my first programming job after college, I was dabbling in graphics for some bit of computer code that analyzed genetic data. I read some works by Edward Tufte, an expert from Yale who made academic munch-meat of visualization data for his career. The verbiage was lofty; the images were inspiring; and I could not figure out how to translate the lofty rhetoric and aesthetics into meaningful graphics and…

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