In this chapter, Drucker traces the history of data visualizations, noting that “the roots of tables, and charts, calendars and timelines, maps and diagrammatic forms are as old as writing and record-keeping.”She begins by offering rubrics for which to study this history. Drucker states that information graphics can be…
Charts showing eyes, ears, noses and other body parts helped officers identify suspects using Bertillon's system.Forensic investigator, French police officer and biometrics researcher Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914) leaves behind a record that is simultaneously one of achievement and one that serves as a warning in our new era of digital…
A NASA data visualization expert, Simmon explores best practices for color, grounding his presentation in the science of visual perception and visual culture. Simmon begins by stating that the purpose of data visualization is to illuminate patterns and relationships hidden in numbers. He illustrates this with an early map of…
Healy, Look at Data: What Makes Bad Figures BadHealy in his introductory chapter from Data Visualization for Social Science seeks to outline organizing principles for effective data visualizations. He first states that he believes the relationship between data and the perceptual features of graphics are more important than esthetics, and…
A matrix is any two dimensional set of numbers, colors, intensities, sized dots or other glyphs. With ‘simple’ matrices, variations along a third or even fourth variable are often represented by color ranges and other types of visual variations between cells on the matrix. Half matrices are usually used for…