Great Book On Information Visualization
Apr 28, 08:36 AM
Ben Fry, one of my favorite information visualization folks, wrote a book called Visualizing Data, published in December 2007. I’ve been reading it and I highly recommend it. In the book he lays out what he considers the core iterative loop for building a visualization. Here’s his core loop.
- Acquire: Obtain the data, whether from a file on a disk or a source over a network.
- Parse: Provide some structure for the data’s meaning, and order it into categories.
- Filter: Remove all but the data of interest.
- Mine: Apply methods from statistics or data mining as a way to discern patterns or place the data in mathematical context.
- Represent: Choose a basic visual model, such as a bar graph, list, or tree.
- Refine: Improve the basic representation to make it clearer and more visually engaging.
- Interact: Add methods for manipulating the data or controlling what features are visible.
This book will definitely inform future visualizations I build.
Also, you should check out some of his video-game-related visualizations. I used to have some of these up on my office wall at Turbine.
