Press Release
December 19, 2007
Visualizing Data -- New from O'Reilly Media: Drawing meaningful information from a sea of numbers
Sebastopol, CA--We live in an information-rich era. Being quite good at
collecting information, we're not especially good at figuring out what to
do with it: understanding it, learning from it, and being able to convey
its meaning to others.
"What do the paths that millions of visitors take through a web site look
like?" asks author Ben Fry in the beginning of his new book, Visualizing
Data (O'Reilly, US $39.99). "How do the 3.1 billion A, C, G and T letters
of the human genome compare to those of the chimp or the mouse? Out of a
few hundred thousand files on your computers hard disk, which ones are
taking up the most space, and how often do you use them?"
With all the data we've collected, we still don't have many satisfactory
answers to these sorts of questions. "This is the greatest challenge of
our information-rich era: how can these questions be answered quickly, if
not instantaneously?" says Fry. "We're getting so good at measuring and
recording things, why haven't we kept up with the methods to understand
and communicate this information?"
Fry points out that all of the previous questions involve a large quantity
of data, which makes it extremely difficult to gain a big picture
understanding of its meaning. The problem is further compounded by the
data's continually changing nature, which can result from the addition of
new information being added or older information continuously being
refined.
Visualizing Data shows readers how to make use of data as a resource
that they might otherwise never tap. Fry teaches a variety of basic
visualization principles, including how to choose the right kind of
display for specific purposes, and how to provide interactive features
that will bring users to a site over and over. Most important, Fry
provides an approach for how to understand data: how to get from a sea of
numbers to meaningful information. Readers of his book will discover:
- 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 to convey
about a data set
This 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, Fry shows 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.
"I'm trying to address people who want to ask questions, to play with
data, to gain an understanding of how to communicate data to others," says
Fry, who explains that the audience for his book is quite broad, and
includes web designers who want to build more complex visualizations than
their tools will allow, as well as software engineers who want to become
adept at writing software that represents data. "Fundamentally, it's a
book for people who have a data set, a curiosity to explore it, and an
idea of what they want to communicate about it."
Performing sophisticated data analysis no longer requires a research
laboratory, just a cheap machine and some code. Complex data sets can be
accessed, explored, and analyzed by the public in a way that simply was
not possible in the past. Visualizing Data shows how.
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.
More information about Visualizing
Data, including table of contents, index,
author bio, and samples
Visualizing Data
Ben Fry
ISBN: 0-596-51455-7 $39.99 US
order@oreilly.com
1-800-998-9938
1-707-827-7000
About O'Reilly
O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.
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