Tamara Munzner - Visualization analysis and design-CRC Press Taylor & Francis Group
The book begins with a definition of vis and walks through its many implications in Chapter 1, which ends with a high-level introduc- tion to an analysis framework of breaking down vis design accord- ing what–why–how questions that have data–task–idiom answers. Chapter 2 addresses the what question with answers about data abstractions, and Chapter 3 addresses the why question with task abstractions, including an extensive discussion of deriving new data, a preview of the framework of design choices for how id- ioms can be designed, and several examples of analysis through this framework.
Chapter 4 extends the analysis framework to two additional lev- els: the domain situation level on top and the algorithm level on the bottom, with the what/why level of data and task abstraction and the how level of visual encoding and interaction idiom design in between the two. This chapter encourages using methods to val- idate your design in a way that matches up with these four levels.
Chapter 5 covers the principles of marks and channels for en- coding information. Chapter 6 presents eight rules of thumb for design.
The core of the book is the framework for analyzing how vis idioms can be constructed out of design choices. Three chapters cover choices of how to visually encode data by arranging space:Chapter 7 for tables, Chapter 8 for spatial data, and Chapter 9 for networks. Chapter 10 continues with the choices for mapping color and other channels in visual encoding. Chapter 11 discusses ways to manipulate and change a view. Chapter 12 covers ways to facet data between multiple views. Choices for how to reduce the amount of data shown in each view are covered in Chapter 13, and Chapter 14 covers embedding information about a focus set within the context of overview data. Chapter 15 wraps up the book with six case studies that are analyzed in detail with the full framework.
Each design choice is illustrated with concrete examples of spe- cific idioms that use it. Each example is analyzed by decompos- ing its design with respect to the design choices that have been presented so far, so these analyses become more extensive as the chapters progress; each ends with a table summarizing the analy- sis. The book’s intent is to get you familiar with analyzing existing idioms as a springboard for designing new ones.
I chose the particular set of concrete examples in this book as evocative illustrations of the space of vis idioms and my way to approach vis analysis. Although this set of examples does cover many of the more popular idioms, it is certainly not intended to be a complete enumeration of all useful idioms; there are many more that have been proposed that aren’t in here. These examples also aren’t intended to be a historical record of who first proposed which ideas: I often pick more recent examples rather than the very first use of a particular idiom.
All of the chapters start with a short section called The Big Pic- ture that summarizes their contents, to help you quickly deter- mine whether a chapter covers material that you care about. They all end with a Further Reading section that points you to more in- formation about their topics. Throughout the book are boxes in the margins: vocabulary notes in purple starting with a star, and cross-reference notes in blue starting with a triangle. Terms are highlighted in purple where they are defined for the first time.
The book has an accompanying web page at http://www.cs.ubc.ca/∼tmm/vadbook with errata, pointers to courses that use the book in different ways, example lecture slides covering the material, and downloadable versions of the diagram figures.