Making Data Visual: A Practical Guide To Using Visualization For Insight

About the BookYou have a mound of data front of you and a suite of computation tools at your disposal. Which parts of the data actually matter? Where is the insight hiding? If you’re a data scientist trying to navigate the murky space between data and insight, this practical book shows you how to make sense of your data through high-level questions, well-defined data analysis tasks, and visualizations to clarify understanding and gain insights along the way. When incorporated into the process early and often, iterative visualization can help you refine the questions you ask of your data. Authors Danyel Fisher and Miriah Meyer provide detailed case studies that demonstrate how this process can evolve in the real world. You’ll learn: • The data counseling process for moving from general to more precise questions about your data, and arriving at a working visualization • The role that visual representations play in data discovery • Common visualization types the tasks they fulfill and the data they use • Visualization techniques that use multiple views and interaction to support analysis of large, complex data sets About the Author Miriah Meyer is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Utah, where she runs the Visualization Design Lab. Her work focuses on designing visualizations for researchers and scholars that help them make sense of complex data. Miriah has collaborated with experts in a broad range of fields, including biology, geography, and poetry. She earned a PhD from the University of Utah in 2008, and worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University until 2011. Danyel Fisher is a Senior Researcher in information visualization and human-computer interaction at Microsoft Research’s VIBE group. His research focuses on ways to help users interact with data more easily. His recent work has looked at ways to make big data analytics faster and more interactive with incremental visualization. Danyel has recently spoken at OpenVisConf and Strata. Danyel received his MS from UC Berkeley, and his PhD from UC Irvine.