Data Visualization: Charts, Maps, and Interactive Graphics

by Robert Grant

This is the age of data. There are more innovations and more opportunities for interesting work with data than ever before, but there is also an overwhelming amount of quantitative information being published every day. Data visualisation has become big business, because communication is the difference between success and failure, no matter how clever the analysis may have been. The ability to visualize data is now a skill in demand across business, government, NGOs and academia. Data Charts, Maps, and Interactive Graphics gives an overview of a wide range of techniques and challenges, while staying accessible to anyone interested in working with and understanding data. Whether you are a student considering a career in data science, an analyst who wants to learn more about visualization, or the manager of a team working with data, this book will introduce you to a broad range of data visualization methods. Cover Landscape of Change uses data about sea level rise, glacier volume decline, increasing global temperatures, and the increasing use of fossil fuels. These data lines compose a landscape shaped by the changing climate, a world in which we are now living. Copyright © Jill Pelto ( ).

248 pages, Paperback

Published December 4, 2018

About the author

Robert Grant (January 24, 1852 – May 19, 1940) was an American author and a jurist who participated in a review of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial a few weeks before their executions.

There are also other authors on Goodreads with the name Robert Grant, including poet, hymn-writer, chairman of directors of the British East India Company and Governor of Bombay Sir Robert Grant MP (1779-1838), who wrote on the trade and government of India and the early history of the East India Company, as well as publishing a book of sacred poems.

Reviews

[Justpassingby]

An overview of things that deserve your attention if you are creating a visual presentation of a dataset. This short book is written with the busy professional in mind, and therefore it has been carefully pruned down to a light read, in short chapters, without mathematics and of course including plenty of visuals. A careful balance is struck between statistics (the author's background) and graphic design.

The presentation is somewhat superficial, but this is compensated by ample sourcing and tips for further reading. Hardly any point is ever made without a real-world or at least realistic-looking example, which again puts the reader at ease and motivates her.

Unfortunately, in his eagerness to keep the sophistication levels low, the author drops a few names that would have merited further elaboration. Bootstrapping is mentioned as a useful technique, and the reader is repeatedly recommended to try it, but unfortunately it is never actually defined. Similarly, logistic regression receives the amount of attention that it merits, but actually telling us what it is appears to require "too much mathematics" - which would have been a valid argument for leaving it out altogether, but then what twisted commercial thinking made him devote an entire titled section to this undefined ghost?

Strong points of this self-help book include the regular appeal to pragmatism (it's ok and even recommended to provide some explanation with a graph) and the preference for interaction and animation as tools to promote insight.