Multimedia advice

Intro to Information Visualization: 50+ blogs, books, people, software & more

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A friend recently emailed me for advice on how to get started learning about data visualization. After overwhelming him with a mega list of resources, I thought that it may also be helpful for some of you. Furthermore, I am currently taking an excellent course with Dr. Brad Hemminger this semester titled Information Visualization, and he has also provided countless resources for his students. Thus, I decided to combine portions of the two lists and publish them for the II community. While it is not an all-encompassing list, I would argue that it’s a great start for beginners trying to get their feet wet. Enjoy!

Info Viz Books:
1) Information Visualization: Perception for Design, 2nd ed. by Colin Ware
2) Information Visualization: Design for Interaction 2nd ed. by Robert Spence
3) Introduction to Information Visualization by Richardo Mazza
4) The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte
5) Now You See It by Stephen Few

Info Viz Articles, Theses, Dissertations, & Publications:
1) Visual tools for the socio–semantic web by Moritz Stefaner
2) Computational Information Design by Ben Fry
3) Information Interaction Design by Nathan Shedroff
4) Information Visualization in the News by Alberto Cairo (draft)
5) Graphs via Ink: Understanding How the Amount of Non-data Ink in a Graph Affects Perception and Learning (PDF) by Julia Kulla-Mader
6) The Eyes Have It: A Task by Data Type Taxonomy for Information Visualizations by Ben Schneiderman
7) Information Visualization for the People by Mike Danziger

Info Viz Blogs:
1) Visual Complexity
2) Infosthetics
3) Simple Complexity
4) Flowing Data
5) Infographics News
6) Biofusion Design
7) Eager Eyes
8 ) Neoformix
9) Statistical Graphics and more
10) Well-formed data

Info Viz Software/Tools:
1) ManyEyes
2) NYTimes Visualization Lab
3) iCharts
4) Processing
5) Flare
6) Tableau
7) Swivel
8 ) Google Visualization API
9) GGobi
10) Protovis

Influential Data Viz People:
1) Edward Tufte
2) Ben Shneiderman
3) Stephen Few
4) Fernanda Viégas
5) Martin Wattenberg
And 60+ more …

Info Viz Research Labs:
1) Information Interfaces Research Group, Georgia Tech
2) LIVE: Laboratory for Information Visualization and Evaluation, Virginia Tech
3) Imager, University of British Columbia
4) Visualization Research at WPI, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
5) Human Computer Interaction Lab, University of Maryland
6) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy
7) PARC: User Interface Research, Palo Alto Research Center

Info Viz Courses:
1) i247: Information Visualization and Presentation, Berkeley, Marti Hearst
2) CS 4460/7450 – Information Visualization, Georgia Institute of Technology, John Stasko
3) CS 5764: Information Visualization, Virginia Tech, Chris North
4) CMSC 828S/838S Information Visualization, University of Maryland, Ben Shneiderman
5) CS294-10 Visualization, Berkeley, Maneesh Agrawala
6) CS 280: Advanced Topics in Information Visualization, University of California: Irvine, Alfred Kobsa
7) Information Visualization, Rutgers, Anselm Spoerri
8 ) CS 171 Visualization, Harvard, Hanspeter Pfister

NOTE: I first tackled this subject back in May, where I wrote the post, “Data visualization tools for free or cheap.” Feel free to continue there if you are still eager to learn more about the field!

Other posts that might interest you:

• 10 multimedia books for your holiday wish list
• Data visualization tools for free or cheap
• Shedroff’s “Information Interaction Design” an inspirational read

© 3 February 2010 Innovative Interactivity (II).