This book aims to be a textbook on data visualization – an interdisciplinary approach that offers huge value for creatives, educators, entrepreneurs, and business leaders in a variety of industries. Whether you are a seasoned visualization designer or just learning about it now, this book will serve as an introduction and reference with examples and case studies.
Data visualization is an essential skill required in today’s data driven world. With its foundations rooted in statistics, psychology, and computer science, practitioners in almost every field use visualization to explore and present data.
We need compelling showcase examples and widely accessible tutorials for general audiences to raise the awareness of information visualization’s potential and, perhaps more importantly, the awareness of problems in other disciplines that existing or innovative approaches in information visualization could resolve.
—Chaomen Chen, 2005
Becoming Visual is about developing a literacy in data visualization by
- Promoting both an exploratory approach and a inquiry based approach to visualization problems;
- Approaching data tasks as visualization problems using techniques from statistics, data mining, and basic quantitative analysis to detect patterns and trends; and
- Contributing a series of cases from a range of industries to exhibit how organizations use data visualization to aide in their decision making, exploration, presentation, and reporting in the real world.
The book is organized into four main components. Inputs highlights the ingredients necessary to produce a graphical representation of data. This involves defining the audience, identifying the task, and the data. Process is the step in-between input and output. It is the transformation of data into pictures. Transformation involves data preparation, analysis, results, chart creation, and refinement. Each of which involves a series of steps.
Output is the graphic itself and how it is used to communicate to an audience. Cases exemplifies how the inputs, process, and outputs come together through real world examples and scenarios by professionals who have incorporated visualization into their practice.