In the age of big data, being able to make sense of data is an important key to success. Interactive Visual Data Analysis advocates the synthesis of visualization, interaction, and automatic computation to facilitate insight generation and knowledge crystallization from large and complex data. The book provides a systematic and comprehensive overview of visual, interactive, and analytical methods. It introduces criteria for designing interactive visual data analysis solutions, discusses factors influencing the design, and examines the involved processes. The reader is made familiar with the basics of visual encoding and gets to know numerous visualization techniques for multivariate data, temporal data, geo-spatial data, and graph data. A dedicated chapter introduces general concepts for interacting with visualizations and illustrates how modern interaction technology can facilitate the visual data analysis in many ways. Addressing today’s large and complex data, the book covers relevant automatic analytical computations to support the visual data analysis. The book also sheds light on advanced concepts for visualization in multi-display environments, user guidance during the data analysis, and progressive visual data analysis. The authors present a top-down perspective on interactive visual data analysis with a focus on concise and clean terminology. Many real-world examples and rich illustrations make the book accessible to a broad interdisciplinary audience from students, to experts in the field, to practitioners in data-intensive application domains. Features: Dedicated to the synthesis of visual, interactive, and analysis methods Systematic top-down view on visualization, interaction, and automatic analysis Broad coverage of fundamental and advanced visualization techniques Comprehensive chapter on interacting with visual representations Extensive integration of automatic computational methods Accessible portrayal of cutting-edge visual analytics technology Foreword by Jack van Wijk For more information, you can also visit the author website, where the book's figures are made available under the CC BY Open Access license.

Graphical practice. Theory of data graphics.

he visual inputs we receive can be collectively called visual data. Precisely how one defines visual data is a key question to ask. That is one of the questions we asked each author who wrote a chapter for this book.

Don't simply show your data—tell a story with it! Storytelling with Data teaches you the fundamentals of data visualization and how to communicate effectively with data. You'll discover the power of storytelling and the way to make data a pivotal point in your story. The lessons in this illuminative text are grounded in theory, but made accessible through numerous real-world examples—ready for immediate application to your next graph or presentation. Storytelling is not an inherent skill, especially when it comes to data visualization, and the tools at our disposal don't make it any easier. This book demonstrates how to go beyond conventional tools to reach the root of your data, and how to use your data to create an engaging, informative, compelling story. Specifically, you'll learn how to: Understand the importance of context and audience Determine the appropriate type of graph for your situation Recognize and eliminate the clutter clouding your information Direct your audience's attention to the most important parts of your data Think like a designer and utilize concepts of design in data visualization Leverage the power of storytelling to help your message resonate with your audience Together, the lessons in this book will help you turn your data into high impact visual stories that stick with your audience. Rid your world of ineffective graphs, one exploding 3D pie chart at a time. There is a story in your data—Storytelling with Data will give you the skills and power to tell it!

"You have a mound of data sitting in front of you and a suite of computation tools at your disposal. And yet, you're stumped as to how to turn that data into insight. Which part of that data actually matters, and where is this insight hidden? If you're a data scientist who struggles to navigate the murky space between data and insight, this book will help you think about and reshape data for visual data exploration. It's ideal for relatively new data scientists, who may be computer-knowledgeable and data-knowledgeable, but do not yet know how to create effective, explorable representations of data. With this book, you'll learn: Task analysis, driven by a series of leading questions that draw out the important aspects of the data to be explored; Visualization patterns, each of which take a different perspective on data and answer different questions; A taxonomy of visualizations for common data types; Techniques for gathering design requirements; When and where to make use of statistical methods."--

The importance of visual data mining, as a strong sub-discipline of data mining, had already been recognized in the beginning of the decade. In 2005 a panel of renowned individuals met to address the shortcomings and drawbacks of the current state of visual information processing. The need for a systematic and methodological development of visual analytics was detected. This book aims at addressing this need. Through a collection of 21 contributions selected from more than 46 submissions, it offers a systematic presentation of the state of the art in the field. The volume is structured in three parts on theory and methodologies, techniques, and tools and applications.

This volume provides a basic framework for using visual data - namely still photographs - as a tool for social analysis. The authors determine the importance of theoretical assumptions in analyzing these data and provide advice on how to use photographs in cognitive, symbolist and structuralist research. The book is richly illustrated with examples ranging from Native American masks to perfume advertisements.