You will find various links to resources that will be helpful for this course. Additional resources will be added throughout the semester.
Here are some reference books recommended for this course:
Visualizing Data: Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment
By Ben Fry, O'Reilly Media, 2007.
By Scott Murray, O'Reilly Media, 2012.
Here are some other books related to visualization that are highly recommended:
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
By Edward Tufte, 2001.
Here are some books that are available for free online:
By Albert-László Barabási (Visualizations by Mauro Martino, Analysis by Márton Pósfai), E-Book, 2012.
The Nature of Code (Uses Processing)
By Daniel Shiffman, Interactive HTML Book, 2012.
And, although not a book per se, the InfoVis Wiki is an amazing resource:
By The InfoVis:Wiki Team
We will also reference several books that are available freely online for USF students through the library and Safrai Books Online:
By Julie Steele and Noah Iliinsky, O'Reilly Media, 2010.
By Noah Iliinsky and Julie Steele, O'Reilly Media, 2011.
Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics
By Nathan Yau, John Wiley & Sons, 2011.
By Mike Dewar, O'Reilly Media, 2012.
The online availability of some of these books on Safari Books Online may change over time.
We will primarily be using Processing and D3 in this class. However, we will explore and use other visualization languages and toolkits.
A free, open source programming language and environment. Allows for rapid prototyping of visual, interactive programs.
A free, small Javascript library well suited for interactive data visualization on the web.
A free online visualization tool that allows users to upload data, select a visualization technique, and share the resulting visualization. Provided by IBM Research and the IBM Cognos software group.
A free service allowing uses to publish interactive data visualizations to the web.
A website that allows users to create and share visualizations, and hosts datasets and visualization challenges.
For homework and projects, make sure to double-check whether you must use Processing or if you can use a visualization toolkit instead.
Many of the toolkits/websites listed above host datasets as well. We will need a wide variety of data sets for this course. There is no shortage of data, but finding data sets that we can work with in this course can be difficult. We need well-formatted data that is moderate in size.
Here are a few resources where you can download free-to-use datasets:
Website for freely available U.S. government data.
Website for freely available U.K. government data.
Data resources from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Center for Disease Control and Prevention
Website for public-use data files from the CDC.
UCI Machine Learning Repository
Repository of data from UCI. Intended for machine learning, but often used for visualization examples.
Stanford Large Network Dataset Collection
Network data sets, including social networks, citation networks, and more.
Visual Analytics Benchmark Repository
Contains datasets and tasks from previous VAST and InfoVis Challenges/Contests.
Historical and modern data from a variety of sources including the U.S. Census, American Community Survey, and ASARB.
Various climate-related data sources.
Resource for free eBooks and texts (useful for text visualization examples).
Aims to show how public data sources can be used, and lists over 200 data sources.
A large dataset (~2.5 TB) of HTTP requests from Indiana University.
You are also welcome to generate your own data sets. For an example of what can be done by tracking day-to-day details, see the Feltron Report.
There are many other data visualization courses with different takes on the field.
University of San Francisco, MSAN 522 Information Visualization
University of San Francisco, ART 335 Information Visualization
Stanford University, CS 448B Data Visualization
Rice University, STAT 645 Data Visualisation
Harvard University, CS 171 Visualization
University of California, Berkeley, CS 294-10 Visualization
University of California, Berkeley, INFO 247 Information Visualization
Georgia Institute of Technology, CS 7450 Information Visualization
University of Maryland, CMSC 734 Information Visualization
Rutgers State University of New Jersey, MLIS Information Visualization
This unordered list is by no means a comprehensive collection of data visualization courses, and the links may disappear over time.
There are many videos, especially from TED, covering topics in data visualization.
Stats that Reshape Your Worldview
TED Talk by Hans Rosling, June 2006
TED Talk by Hans Rosling, August 2009
The Beauty of Data Visualization
TED Talk by David McCandless, August 2010
Documentary by Geoff McGhee, 2010
What We Learned from 5 Million Books
TED Talk by Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden, September 2011
Additional videos will be added as they are shown in class.
There are many web articles about data visualization that we will discuss in class.
Charts: Worth A Thousand Words
The Economist, December 19, 2007
Henry Woodbury, Dynamic Diagrams, January 8, 2008
What is Visualization? A Definition
Robert Kosara, Eager Eyes, July 24, 2008
The list above is unsorted. Keep in mind that many of these links may disappear over time.