Data Visualization Toolkit

Create Beautiful Visualizations that Free Your Data to Tell Powerful Truths “The depth of Barrett Clark’s knowledge shines through in his writing: clear, concise, and confident. Barrett has been practicing all of this stuff in his day job for many years–Postgres, D3, GIS, all of it. The knowledge in this book is real-world and hard-earned!” –From the Foreword by Obie Fernandez Data Visualization Toolkit is your hands-on, practical, and holistic guide to the art of visualizing data. You’ll learn how to use Rails, jQuery, D3, Leaflet, PostgreSQL, and PostGIS together, creating beautiful visualizations and maps that give your data a voice and to make it “dance.” Barrett Clark teaches through real-world problems and examples developed specifically to illuminate every technique you need to generate stunningly effective visualizations. You’ll move from the absolute basics toward deep dives, mastering diverse visualizations and discovering when to use each. Along the way, you’ll build three start-to-finish visualization applications, using actual real estate, weather, and travel datasets. Clark addresses every component of data visualization: your data, database, application server, visualization libraries, and more. He explains data transformations; presents expert techniques in JavaScript, Ruby, and SQL; and illuminates key concepts associated with both descriptive statistics and geospatial data. Throughout, everything is aimed at one goal: to help you cut through the clutter and let your data tell all it can. This guide will help you Explore and understand the data visualization technology stack Master the thought process and steps involved in importing data Extract, transform, and load data in usable, reliable form Handle spotty data, or data that doesn’t line up with what your chart expects Use D3 to build pie and bar charts, scatter and box plots, and more Work effectively with time-series data Tweak Ruby and SQL to optimize performance with large datasets Use raw SQL in Rails: window functions, subqueries, and common table expressions Build chord diagrams and time-series aggregates Use separate databases or schema for reporting databases Integrate geographical data via geospatial SQL queries Construct maps with Leaflet and Rails Query geospatial data the “Rails way” and the “raw SQL way”

This Java-built "Visualization Toolkit (VTK)" will enable readers to represent any set of data--medical, scientific, or financial--in 3D. Users will learn to build 3D Java applets with the VTK software on the CD-ROM. The book covers Web applications like VRML, Java, and Java3D.

Now more than ever, content must be visual if it is to travel far. Readers everywhere are overwhelmed with a flow of data, news, and text. Visuals can cut through the noise and make it easier for readers to recognize and recall information. Yet many researchers were never taught how to present their work visually. This book details essential strategies to create more effective data visualizations. Jonathan Schwabish walks readers through the steps of creating better graphs and how to move beyond simple line, bar, and pie charts. Through more than five hundred examples, he demonstrates the do’s and don’ts of data visualization, the principles of visual perception, and how to make subjective style decisions around a chart’s design. Schwabish surveys more than eighty visualization types, from histograms to horizon charts, ridgeline plots to choropleth maps, and explains how each has its place in the visual toolkit. It might seem intimidating, but everyone can learn how to create compelling, effective data visualizations. This book will guide you as you define your audience and goals, choose the graph that best fits for your data, and clearly communicate your message.

Linked Data (LD) is a well-established standard for publishing and managing structured information on the Web, gathering and bridging together knowledge from different scientific and commercial domains. The development of Linked Data Visualization techniques and tools has been adopted as the established practice for the analysis of this vast amount of information by data scientists, domain experts, business users, and citizens. This book covers a wide spectrum of visualization topics, providing an overview of the recent advances in this area, focusing on techniques, tools, and use cases of visualization and visual analysis of LD. It presents core concepts related to data visualization and LD technologies, techniques employed for data visualization based on the characteristics of data, techniques for Big Data visualization, tools and use cases in the LD context, and, finally, a thorough assessment of the usability of these tools under different scenarios. The purpose of this book is to offer a complete guide to the evolution of LD visualization for interested readers from any background and to empower them to get started with the visual analysis of such data. This book can serve as a course textbook or as a primer for all those interested in LD and data visualization.

Tell your story and show it with data, using free and easy-to-learn tools on the web. This introductory book teaches you how to design interactive charts and customized maps for your website, beginning with simple drag-and-drop tools such as Google Sheets, Datawrapper, and Tableau Public. You'll also gradually learn how to edit open source code templates like Chart.js, Highcharts, and Leaflet on GitHub. Hands-On Data Visualization for All takes you step-by-step through tutorials, real-world examples, and online resources. This hands-on resource is ideal for students, nonprofit organizations, small business owners, local governments, journalists, academics, and anyone who wants to take data out of spreadsheets and turn it into lively interactive stories. No coding experience is required. Build interactive charts and maps and embed them in your website Understand the principles for designing effective charts and maps Learn key data visualization concepts to help you choose the right tools Convert and transform tabular and spatial data to tell your data story Edit and host Chart.js, Highcharts, and Leaflet map code templates on GitHub Learn how to detect bias in charts and maps produced by others

Learn effective tools and techniques to separate big data into manageable and logical components for efficient data visualization About This Book This unique guide teaches you how to visualize your cluttered, huge amounts of big data with ease It is rich with ample options and solid use cases for big data visualization, and is a must-have book for your shelf Improve your decision-making by visualizing your big data the right way Who This Book Is For This book is for data analysts or those with a basic knowledge of big data analysis who want to learn big data visualization in order to make their analysis more useful. You need sufficient knowledge of big data platform tools such as Hadoop and also some experience with programming languages such as R. This book will be great for those who are familiar with conventional data visualizations and now want to widen their horizon by exploring big data visualizations. What You Will Learn Understand how basic analytics is affected by big data Deep dive into effective and efficient ways of visualizing big data Get to know various approaches (using various technologies) to address the challenges of visualizing big data Comprehend the concepts and models used to visualize big data Know how to visualize big data in real time and for different use cases Understand how to integrate popular dashboard visualization tools such as Splunk and Tableau Get to know the value and process of integrating visual big data with BI tools such as Tableau Make sense of the visualization options for big data, based upon the best suited visualization techniques for big data In Detail When it comes to big data, regular data visualization tools with basic features become insufficient. This book covers the concepts and models used to visualize big data, with a focus on efficient visualizations. This book works around big data visualizations and the challenges around visualizing big data and address characteristic challenges of visualizing like speed in accessing, understanding/adding context to, improving the quality of the data, displaying results, outliers, and so on. We focus on the most popular libraries to execute the tasks of big data visualization and explore "big data oriented" tools such as Hadoop and Tableau. We will show you how data changes with different variables and for different use cases with step-through topics such as: importing data to something like Hadoop, basic analytics. The choice of visualizations depends on the most suited techniques for big data, and we will show you the various options for big data visualizations based upon industry-proven techniques. You will then learn how to integrate popular visualization tools with graphing databases to see how huge amounts of certain data. Finally, you will find out how to display the integration of visual big data with BI using Cognos BI. Style and approach With the help of insightful real-world use cases, we'll tackle data in the world of big data. The scalability and hugeness of the data makes big data visualizations different from normal data visualizations, and this book addresses all the difficulties encountered by professionals while visualizing their big data.

Designing a complete visualization system involves many subtle decisions. When designing a complex, real-world visualization system, such decisions involve many types of constraints, such as performance, platform (in)dependence, available programming languages and styles, user-interface toolkits, input/output data format constraints, integration wi

NOW IN FULL COLOR! Written by sought-after speaker, designer, and researcher Stephanie D. H. Evergreen, Effective Data Visualization shows readers how to create Excel charts and graphs that best communicate their data findings. This comprehensive how-to guide functions as a set of blueprints—supported by both research and the author’s extensive experience with clients in industries all over the world—for conveying data in an impactful way. Delivered in Evergreen’s humorous and approachable style, the book covers the spectrum of graph types available beyond the default options, how to determine which one most appropriately fits specific data stories, and easy steps for building the chosen graph in Excel. Now in full color with new examples throughout, the Second Edition includes a revamped chapter on qualitative data, nine new quantitative graph types, new shortcuts in Excel, and an entirely new chapter on Sharing Your Data With the World, which provides advice on using dashboards. New from Stephanie Evergreen! The Data Visualization Sketchbook provides advice on getting started with sketching and offers tips, guidance, and completed sample sketches for a number of reporting formats. Bundle Effective Data Visualization, 2e, and The Data Visualization Sketchbook, using ISBN 978-1-5443-7178-8!