I found “The Wall street Journal. Guide to Information Design” in a bookshop and thought to give it a go. It is written by Dona M. Wong, an old student of Edward Tufte. The books aim is to be a “reference to be put on ones desk”, the question is who should put it on his/her desk and who not? Distributed over five chapters to book maintains a very basic level of graphic design. Chapter two has a nice outline showing Do’s on the right page and Don’ts on the left page, and contains a lot of useful tips (ie. try to avoid a legend in a line graph, but just label the lines on the right side of the line) but the book rarely explains the theory behind the advice. For this, one has to grab back to Tuftes “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”. Continue reading
Tag Archives: visualization
Book review: Guide to Information Graphics
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Papers of VizBi ’14 keynote by Jeff Heer
Last week I attended the Visualizing Biological Data (VizBi) conference in Heidelberg. According to the website the mission of the conference is to “ bring together scientists, illustrators, and designers actively using or developing computational visualization to study a diverse range of biological data.”. I can only say the organisers more than succeeded in this mission, it was indeed a very interdisciplinary, creative and interactive crowd. The first keynote of VizBi ’14 was presented by Jeffrey Heer from the University of Washington, since the papers he referred to are mostly published in non-PubMed journals I tried to collect links to the pdfs here. Update: Added two more references supplied by Heer.
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The 9 reads for Christmas
A selection of some interesting papers of the past period. Unfortunately some are only accessible for subscribers. Some topics covered; protein folding and design, antibiotic resistance genes, RNA polymerase complex and a paper on choosing the right color for your data.
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Untangling the Hairball by O’Donoghue (ICSB13)
Today Sean O’Donoghue talked at the 14th International Conference on Systems Biology (ICSB) in Copenhagen. O’Donoghue is affiliated with the Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and the Garvan Institute of Medical Research both located in Sydney. His talk was officially titled “Visual Analytics: A New Approach for Systems Biology” but he immediately after the start admitted it could better be named “Untangling the Hairball“. Using 6 guidelines he quickly showed the basic principles of data visualization for scientists. Since his talk contained quite some references to journal articles, webservers and online tools I thought it would be useful to put everything together in a post.
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Visualize your trail
Currently I’m participating in the Quantified Self summer school at the CIID (Copenhagen Institute for Interaction Design). The focus lies on the visualisation of complex data sets, currently a hot topic in science. As workhorse the Java based environment Processing is used, which is widely known in the visualization community. (For some vivid examples check openprocessing.org).
To get a better grasp of Java in general and processing in particular I wrote a small package that visualizes all the places you have visited with the corresponding color mood (=the most prominent color in the pictures you took).
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