Ben Fry

Ben Fry: Visualizing Data




Ben Fry, "Visualizing Data"
O'Reilly Media, Inc. | 2008-01-11 | ISBN: 0596514557 | PDF | 382 pages |
The O'Reilly website says, "How you can take advantage of data that you might otherwise never use? With the help of a powerful new programming environment [Processing], this book helps you represent data accurately on the Web and elsewhere, complete with user interaction, animation, and more. You'll learn basic visualization principles, how to choose the right kind of display for your purposes, and how to provide interactive features to design entire interfaces around large, complex data sets."

Martin Wattenberg from the IBM Watson Research Center says, "This wonderfully detailed guide, by one of the masters of modern data graphics, tells you everything you need to know to code your own visualizations from scratch. Perhaps most valuable are the many examples where Fry demonstrates how to refine a bare-bones concept into a beautiful, effective finished piece. Read this book, and you'll never again be dependent on someone else's view of your data."

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Ben Fry: Visualizing Data: Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment




Enormous quantities of data go unused or underused today, simply because people can't visualize the quantities and relationships in it. Using a downloadable programming environment developed by the author, Visualizing Data demonstrates methods for representing data accurately on the Web and elsewhere, complete with user interaction, animation, and more. How do the 3.1 billion A, C, G and T letters of the human genome compare to those of a chimp or a mouse? What do the paths that millions of visitors take through a web site look like? With Visualizing Data, you learn how to answer complex questions like these with thoroughly interactive displays. We're not talking about cookie-cutter charts and graphs. This book teaches you how to design entire interfaces around large, complex data sets with the help of a powerful new design and prototyping tool called "Processing." Used by many researchers and companies to convey specific data in a clear and understandable manner, the Processing beta is available free. With this tool and Visualizing Data as a guide, you'll learn basic visualization principles, how to choose the right kind of display for your purposes, and how to provide interactive features that will bring users to your site over and over. This book teaches you: The seven stages of visualizing data -- acquire, parse, filter, mine, represent, refine, and interact How all data problems begin with a question and end with a narrative construct that provides a clear answer without extraneous details Several example projects with the code to make them work Positive and negative points of each representation discussed. The focus is on customization so that each one best suits what you want toconvey about your data set The book does not provide ready-made "visualizations" that can be plugged into any data set. Instead, with chapters divided by types of data rather than types of display, you'll learn how each visualization conveys the unique properties of the data it represents -- why the data was collected, what's interesting about it, and what stories it can tell. Visualizing Data teaches you how to answer questions, not simply display information.

About the Author
Ben Fry received his doctorate from the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory and was the 2006-2007 Nierenberg Chair of Design for the Carnegie Mellon School of Design.. He worked with Casey Reas to develop Processing, which won a Golden Nica from the Prix Ars Electronica in 2005. Ben's work has received a New Media Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, and been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Ars Electronica, the 2002 Whitney Biennial and the 2003 Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial.
Product Details

* Paperback: 382 pages
* Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. (January 11, 2008)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 0596514557
* ISBN-13: 978-0596514556

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