Contents

Preface

Introduction

PART I foundations

1 What We Talk About When We Talk About Visualization

To Learn More

2 The Five Qualities of Great Visualizations

The Hockey Stick Chart

Truthful

Functional

Beautiful

Insightful

Enlightening

To Learn More

PART II truthful

3 The Truth Continuum

Dubious Models

The Mind, That Clumsy Modeler

Why Are We So Often Mistaken?

Mind Bug 1: Patternicity

Mind Bug 2: Storytelling

Mind Bug 3: Confirmation

Truth Is Neither Absolute, Nor Relative

The Skills of the Educated Person

To Learn More

4 Of Conjectures and Uncertainty

The Scientific Stance

From Curiosity to Conjectures

Hypothesizing

An Aside on Variables

On Studies

Doing Experiments

About Uncertainty

To Learn More

PART III functional

5 Basic Principles of Visualization

Visually Encoding Data

Choosing Graphic Forms

A Grain of Salt

Practical Tips About those Tricky Scales

Organizing the Display

Put Your Work to the Test

To Learn More

6 Exploring Data with Simple Charts

The Norm and the Exceptions

The Mode, the Median, and the Mean

Weighting Means

Range

Some Fun with Ranges

To Learn More

7 Visualizing Distributions

The Variance and the Standard Deviation

Standard Deviation and Standard Scores

Presenting Stories with Frequency Charts

How Standardized Scores Mislead Us

Peculiarities of the Normal Distribution

Percentiles, Quartiles, and the Box Plot

Manipulating Data

Frequency Over Time

To Learn More

8 Revealing Change

Trend, Seasonality, and Noise

Decomposing a Time Series

Visualizing Indexes

From Ratios to Logs

How Time Series Charts Mislead

Communicating Change

To Learn More

9 Seeing Relationships

From Association to Correlation

Smoothers

Matrices and Parallel Coordinate Plots

Correlation for Communication

Regression

From Correlation to Causation

Data Transformation

To Learn More

10 Mapping Data

Projection

Data on Maps

Point Data Maps

Line Maps

The Basics of Choropleth Maps

Classifying Data

Using Choropleth Maps

Other Kinds of Data Maps

To Learn More

11 Uncertainty and Significance

Back to Distributions

The Standard Error

Building Confidence Intervals

Disclosing Uncertainty

The Best Advice You’ll Ever Get: Ask

How Has Stuff Been Measured?

Dispatches from the Data Jungle

Significance, Size, and Power

To Learn More

PART IV practice

12 On Creativity and Innovation

The Popularizers

News Applications

Those Enchanting Europeans

Making Science Visual

Culture Data

The Artistic Fringes

Epilogue

Index