The book is largely aimed at web designers who are looking to include interactive data visualisations in their work. It includes some introductory material on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, so has some value for programmers moving into web visualisation. I quite liked the repetition of this relatively basic material, and the conceptual introduction to the d3 library.

I found the book rather slow: on page 197 – approaching the final fifth of the book – we were still making a bar chart. A smaller effort was expended in that period on scatter graphs. As a data scientist, I expect to have several dozen plot types in that number of pages! This is something of which Scott warns us, though. d3 is a visualisation framework built for explanatory presentation (i.e. you know the story you want to tell) rather than being an exploratory tool (i.e. you want to find out about your data). To be clear: this “slowness” is not a fault of the book, rather a disjunction between the book and my expectations.

From a technical point of view, d3 works by binding data to elements in the DOM for a webpage. It’s possible to do this for any element type, but practically speaking only Scaleable Vector Graphics (SVG) elements make real sense. This restriction means that d3 will only work for more recent browsers. This may be a possible problem for those trapped in some corporate environments. The library contains a lot of helper functions for generating scales, loading up data, selecting and modifying elements, animation and so forth. d3 is low-level library; there is no PlotBarChart function.

Achieving the static effects demonstrated in this book using other tools such as R, Matlab, or Python would be a relatively straightforward task. The animations, transitions and interactivity would be more difficult to do. More widely, the d3 library supports the creation of hierarchical visualisations which I would struggle to create using other tools.

This book is quite a basic introduction, you can get a much better overview of what is possible with d3 by looking at the API documentation and the Gallery. Scott lists quite a few other resources including a wide range for the d3 library itself, systems built on d3, and alternatives for d3 if it were not the library you were looking for.

I can see myself using d3 in the future, perhaps not for building generic tools but for custom visualisations where the data is known and the aim is to best explain that data. Scott quotes Ben Schniederman on this regarding the structure of such visualisations:

overview first, zoom and filter, then details on demand

Previously in this area, I’ve read Tufte’s book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Nathan Yau’s Visualize This. Tufte’s book is based around a theory of effective visualisation whilst Visualize This is a more practical guide featuring detailed code examples. Kirk’s book fits between the two: it contains some material on the more theoretical aspects of effective visualisation as well as an annotated list of software tools; but the majority of the book covers the end-to-end design process.

Data Vizualisation introduced me to Anscombe’s Quartet. The Quartet is four small datasets, eleven (x,y) coordinate pairs in each. The Quartet is chosen so the common statistical properties (e.g. mean values of x and y, standard deviations for same, linear regression coefficients) for each set are identical, but when plotted they look very different. The numbers are shown in the table below.

Plotted they look like this:

Aside from set 4, the numbers look unexceptional. However, the plots look strikingly different. We can easily classify their differences visually, despite the sets having the same gross statistical properties. This highlights the power of visualisation. As a scientist, I am constantly plotting the data I’m working on to see what is going on and as a sense check: eyeballing columns of numbers simply doesn’t work. Kirk notes that the design criteria for such exploratory visualisations are quite different from those highlighting particular aspects of a dataset, more abstract “data art” presentations, or a interactive visualisations prepared for others to use.

In contrast to the books by Tufte and Yau, this book is much more about how to do data visualisation as a job. It talks pragmatically about getting briefs from the client and their demands. I suspect much of this would apply to any design work.

I liked Kirk’s “Eight Hats of data visualisation design” metaphor; which name the skills a visualiser requires: Initiator, Data Scientist, Journalist, Computer Scientist, Designer, Cognitive Scientist, Communicator and Project Manager. In part, this covers what you will require to do data visualisation, but it also gives you an idea of whom you might turn to for help  –  someone with the right hat.

The book is scattered with examples of interesting visualisations, alongside a comprehensive taxonomy of chart types. Unsurprisingly, the chart types are classified in much the same way as statistical methods: in terms of the variable categories to be displayed (i.e. continuous, categorical and subdivisions thereof). There is a temptation here though: I now want to make a Sankey diagram… even if my data doesn’t require it!

In terms of visualisation creation tools, there are no real surprises. Kirk cites Excel first, but this is reasonable: it’s powerful, ubiquitous, easy to use and produces decent results as long as you don’t blindly accept defaults or get tempted into using 3D pie charts. He also mentions the use of Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape to tidy up charts generated in more analysis-oriented packages such as R. With a programming background, the temptation is to fix problems with layout and design programmatically which can be immensely difficult. Listed under programming environments is the D3 Javascript library, this is a system I’m interested in using  –  having had some fun with Protovis, a D3 predecessor.

Data Visualization works very well as an ebook. The figures are in colour (unlike the printed book) and references are hyperlinked from the text. It’s quite a slim volume which I suspect compliments Andy Kirk’s “in-person” courses well.