Beautiful Visualization: Looking at Data through the Eyes of Experts [Paperback]

Like all of O'Reilly's Beautiful Series this collection offers an excellent overview of the subject matter it describes; it is carefully edited to provide smooth reading of insights of multiple experts on telling a clear simplifying visual story with data. These viewpoints, war stories and insights from multiple practitioners is as beautiful as any of Edward Tufte's works but provides more practical insight into the process of converting raw uninterpreted data on a complex problem into a computer generated visual story. Each of these data points and illustrations give new insight into the process of converting data complexity into a simplified and explanatory visual presentation. Insights into the process of exploiting software methods for showing this story are also given in sufficient depth something else that would not be gained from other Tuftean works on Information Design. The heavy coated stock and color corrected illustrations in this deceptively compact volume fully illustrate the variety and beauty of the authors visualization examples.

I found all of the illustrated chapters and differing expert viewpoints on visual storytelling with data extremely valuable. A slight nit I would have with this phenomenal work is that I would have placed Jessica Hagy's chapter entitled Visualization: Indexed derived from her blog on visual storytelling first because of its explanatory power. But, perhaps the editors felt that a different emphasis was appropriate in that this is an O'Reilly collection emphasizing Visual Storytelling with The Computer as the Preeminent Tool.

A Beautiful Coffee Table Book that will serve both scientists and graphic artists.

--Ira Laefsky
MSE/MBA

HCI and IT Consultant formerly on the Senior Staff of Arthur D. Little Inc. and Digital Equipment Corporation

I feel the major areas where good visualization adds value is - avenues of knowledge discovery, information presentation or simply context exploration where one does not know beforehand what insights data may reveal or the extent of relationships between data points. It can be debated that good visualizations could possibly increase cognitive resources available to our minds and decrease conceptual load that has to be dealt with at one time. Visual analytics is an invaluable tool for divergent thinking as well. Coming up with good visualizations is hard but its impact can be immediate and convincing. The visual impact is probabaly more because visual pathways have higher bandwidth at the systems level directly to our reptilian brain whereas logical reasoning resides on the neocortex. Sometimes we just have to see to believe.

The book does an excellent job of visiting various applicable domains. There is enough variety to keep you occupied. Its covers visualizing social datasets(link-node), hierarchical datasets(trees), categorical datasets(relational), time-varying datasets and other most commonly found datasets in scientific and information visualizations. Most chapters are well written with plenty of visuals. If you are an ardent fan of visuals you probabaly have seen everything in this book at one place or another. I think a significant part of the information is derived from papers or other well known publications. You can find almost anything by taking the visualcomplexity website as a starting point. However, the book can save you the research and is an excellent introductory text to expand your knowledge on visualizations.

That being said, I feel its little expensive for its size and as most content is there on the web already, O'Reilly should have listed it at slightly lesser cost. In case you are not going to buy, its a 5-star book no doubt.

I am relatively new to creating data visualizations, so I was very curious to see what kinds of ways I could express data by reading about what experts do. Beautiful Visualization is an excellent resource, mostly for those who are not novices like myself, but regardless, is a wonderful learning tool.

The chapters are written by different people, each with different methodologies and tools that they use to visualize data. Several chapters include sample code or suggested applications you can use to create visualizations, most of them open source. A key thread throughout the course of this book is using visualization to tell stories that may not otherwise be told or realized by simple data evaluation.