Visual Insights ─ A Practical Guide to Making Sense of Data

In the age of Big Data, the tools of information visualization offer us a macroscopeto help us make sense of the avalanche of data available on every subject. This book offers a gentleintroduction to the design of insightful information visualizations. It is the only book on thesubject that teaches nonprogrammers how to use open code and open data to design insightfulvisualizations. Readers will learn to apply advanced data mining and visualization techniques tomake sense of temporal, geospatial, topical, and network data. The book, developed for use in aninformation visualization MOOC, covers data analysis algorithms that enable extraction of patternsand trends in data, with chapters devoted to "when" (temporal data), "where"(geospatial data), "what" (topical data), and "with whom" (networks and trees);and to systems that drive research and development. Examples of projects undertaken for clientsinclude an interactive visualization of the success of game player activity in World ofWarcraft; a visualization of 311 number adoption that shows the diffusion of non-emergencycalls in the United States; a return on investment study for two decades of HIV/AIDS researchfunding by NIAID; and a map showing the impact of the HiveNYC Learning Network. VisualInsights will be an essential resource on basic information visualization techniques forscholars in many fields, students, designers, or anyone who works with data.

Katy Borner is Victor H. Yngve Professor of Information Science at Indiana University and the author of Atlas of Science: Visualizing What We Know (MIT Press). David E. Polley is on the research staff at the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at Indiana University.