Resources

This is (I hope needless to say) a living document, and I’ll be adding to it continually…

My Stuff

You can find a fairly succinct statement of my overall views on visualization in my article “The Language of Visualisation” (available as a PDF here), originally written for the Communicating Astronomy with the Public Journal as part of my “Visualising Astronomy” column. (A European journal, which explains the variant spelling of “visualising.”)

Here’s a YouTube video featuring 40 minutes of me talking about “The Power of Data Visualization” at the Forum on Digital Media for STEM Learning: Climate Education held at WGBH in November 2015. I talk a lot about planetariums.

Sites

Science Visualization

Jen Christiansen is the senior graphics editor at Scientific American and a spectacularly insightful thinker. You should read everything she writes for the SciAm blog. Thoughtful, wonderful stuff.

Data Visualization

Albert Cairo’s The Functional Art is a must read, with frequent, detailed posts about the choices made in depicting data and the ways in which visuals trick us, often deliberately.

Nathan Yau’s Flowing Data offers regularly updated insights into various applications of data—from visualization to analysis, with more emphasis on technical processes than Cairo.

Noah Iliinsky hasn’t updated his Complex Diagrams blog in a good long while, but there’s some great stuff there! The Properties and Best Uses of Visual Encodings PDF is probably my favorite (along with an IBM whitepaper on how to use it), but I also like the Four Pillars of Visualization.

At some point, I rean across Ross Ihaka’s online resources for his Statistics 120 – Information Visualisation class, which he evidently taught for the University of Auckland from 1999–2002. There’s some great stuff here—for example, a discussion of Stephens’s Law he describes in Lecture 11 and Chapter 5 of his notes. I wish I could have taken the class!

You also learn by looking at (and critiquing) questionable work. My favorite site for this is WTF Visualizations, which explicitly showcases “visualizations that make no sense,” typically with little or no comment. (Once upon a time, Terrible Infographics on Tumblr provided several more examples, often with a little more to say about each egregious example; sadly, it sparked and fizzled six years ago.)

Color

Everyone should definitely read Rob Simmon’s six-part “Subtleties of Color” article, written when Rob worked for NASA. It covers all the bases and points you to many useful resources.

(And just for kicks, everyone should read Randall Munroe’s xkcd color survey results, which underscores the highly subjective nature of color perception.)

A brilliantly-titled blog post by Matthew Ström, “How to pick the least wrong colors,” goes into exhaustive detail about Ström’s process in exploring a numerical method for designing easy-to-read color palettes.

I’m colorblind, so I feel compelled to share some resources that will help designers accommodate me and my fellow differently-abled viewers. The main challenge is often how to replicate the experience of seeing what colorblind people will see. A few valuable resources:

  • Color Oracle is a plug-in that allows you to preview how content looks to colorblind people
  • Color for Color Blindness is an interactive color palette tool
  • Color Brewer will help you create colorblind-friendly palettes (note that you have to select the “colorblind safe” tickbox)
  • Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop both offer the option to simulate how your work will appear to colorblind viewers (see “Soft-proof for color blindness” on this page)
  • Gimp offers a “Color Deficient Vision” display filter (more in the manual for 2.10 here)

Books

Colin Ware’s Visual Thinking for Design is a slim, easily digestible must-read for anybody interested in the visual representation of data. His longer, heavier, more obliquely titled Information Visualization Perception for Design (I have the second edition, but it’s currently in its fourth) is also a valuable resource, albeit less user friendly.

Julie Steele and Noah Iliinsky’s Designing Data Visualizations is an even slimmer volume, but it’s packed with good advice, especially for people who want to deploy a standard toolkit of charts and graphs effectively. If you purchase the book, I recommend its digital edition—the print-on-demand version is in black and white, which makes portions of the book practically indecipherable.

I recently ran across Calus O. Wilke’s Fundamentals of Data Visualization, a quite thorough tome that’s freely available online. I’m not a fan of all his examples, but his introductory chapters on mapping data onto aesthetics and color scales are really quite good.

The aforementioned Nathan Yau has written a couple of worthwhile books, and I think my favorite is Data Points (subtitled “Visualization That Means Something”), which avoids technical digressions to focus on questions of design. That said, his more recent Visualize This offers great advice on the nuts and bolts of creating visualizations with a variety of common tools, with actual code examples in JavaScript, Python, and R.

I guess I have to mention Tufte. A lot of folks got their start thinking about these topics by reading Tufte, and I’m no exception, but honestly, I wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend any of his books (even though I have copies of all of them).

Articles

I mention Noah Iliinsky a few times above, so what’s one more reference? His whitepaper for IBM, “Choosing visual properties for successful visualizations,” is a quick and easy introduction to some core concepts in thinking about visualizing data. Available via Dropbox as a PDF.

In May 2017, Northeastern University’s Storybench published the results of interviewing “72 data journalists, web developers, interactive graphics editors, and project managers in leading digital newsrooms around the world,” extracting lessons learned and sharing them in the form of a paper, “Collaborative, Open, Mobile: A Thematic Exploration of Best Practices at the Forefront of Digital Journalism,” available here as a PDF.

Gatherings

I currently co-chaired the Gordon Research Conference for Visualization in Science and Education in 2017 and 2019, and after a brief but understandable hiatus, it will resume in 2023. A remarkable, highly interdisciplinary gathering of academics and practitioners.