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Data looks better naked

darkhorseanalytics.com

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Re: Data looks better naked

#23
post #19

That's just following Edward Tufte's maxim to minimize chart junk. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartjunk Any of you on HN that aren't familiar with "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" should give it a read (and the rest of his books).

> and the rest of his books I find his books to be a bit too light on the content. All of them combined would've made a great book that would still be of a reasonable thickness, but he is self-published and he makes his living from lectures and book sales, so he's probably not too interested in that.

His books were written over 24 years so they idea of writing one great book is just not a practical one. He made his living as a professor not simply self-publishing, lectures and book sales. For someone who evangelizes effective presentation of information, creating a CliffsNotes or Nutshell version just completely misses the point of his work.

Re: Data looks better naked

#24
Anybody has good resources (preferably free) on creating online visualizations. Not links to the d3.js documentation but good tutorials creating visualizations you often use on the internet. Like creating your own cool dashboard and stuff like that.

Re: Data looks better naked

#25
post #24

Anybody has good resources (preferably free) on creating online visualizations. Not links to the d3.js documentation but good tutorials creating visualizations you often use on the internet. Like creating your own cool dashboard and stuff like that.

Here: http://hackershelf.com/topic/visualization/. I'm sure you can find more if you fish around the "topics" section.

Re: Data looks better naked

#26
post #24

Anybody has good resources (preferably free) on creating online visualizations. Not links to the d3.js documentation but good tutorials creating visualizations you often use on the internet. Like creating your own cool dashboard and stuff like that.

http://flowingdata.com/category/tutorials/

not web-centric but the best source I know of offhand

(edit to add ..)

http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000345/index.ht... is a viz book that uses d3. I haven't read it but the guy who wrote it does good work

Re: Data looks better naked

#27
Does anyone have any examples of great analytics dashboards(of any kind)? I've always been a bit unimpressed with most of them. Making the base presentation simple and clean while still allowing powerful filtering can be tricky.

Re: Data looks better naked

#28

That's just following Edward Tufte's maxim to minimize chart junk. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartjunk Any of you on HN that aren't familiar with "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" should give it a read (and the rest of his books).

It provides steps to get from the junk to something relatively clean. Many people could benefit from following that, but software that doesn't spit out the junk in the first place would be better

Re: Data looks better naked

#29
post #24

Anybody has good resources (preferably free) on creating online visualizations. Not links to the d3.js documentation but good tutorials creating visualizations you often use on the internet. Like creating your own cool dashboard and stuff like that.

Forget documentation, look at tutorials (list here: https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Tutorials, for example look at this one: http://vogievetsky.github.io/IntroD3/).

And later - look at examples (https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery or http://christopheviau.com/d3list/gallery.html). IMHO it is the best way to learn D3.js and data vis in general.

Some other links: https://delicious.com/stared/d3js

Re: Data looks better naked

#30
post #23
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the rest of his books I find his books to be a bit too light on the content. All of them combined would've made a great book that would still be of a reasonable thickness, but he is self-published and he makes his living from lectures and book sales, so he's probably not too interested in that.

His books were written over 24 years so they idea of writing one great book is just not a practical one. He made his living as a professor not simply self-publishing, lectures and book sales. For someone who evangelizes effective presentation of information, creating a CliffsNotes or Nutshell version just completely misses the point of his work.

I can't agree. The rest of those books contain roughly the same amount of actual information as his first. I went to his workshop, in which he seemed to be showing as much restraint as he could to not talk exclusively about his lawn sculptures.

Tufte has some great ideas, but would benefit from a ruthless editor. As a guy who's self-published, he does not get the benefit of that kind of feedback.

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