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Table of Contents

• ↓ In this Chapter
• ↓ What’s New in This Edition?
• ↓ What You Will Learn
• ↓ The Right Frame of Mind
• ↓ How to Use This Book
• ↓ Conventions
• ↓ Top Alternatives to socviz.co

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"This is the website for the second edition of Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction, forthcoming from Princeton University Press. It contains a complete draft of the manuscript. The book is not yet available for pre-order. But, if you would like to receive one (and only one) email to let you know when you can order it, please fill out this form. Your email will be used for this single purpose only and will not be shared with anyone."

"You should look at your data. Graphs and charts let you explore and learn about the structure of the information you collect. Good data visualizations also make it easier to communicate your ideas and findings to other people. Beyond that, producing effective plots from your own data is the best way to develop a good eye for reading and understanding graphs—good and bad—made by others, whether presented in research articles, business slide decks, public policy advocacy, or media reports. This book teaches you how to do it."

"My main goal is to introduce you to both the ideas and the methods of data visualization in a sensible, comprehensible, reproducible way. Some classic works on visualizing data, such as The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Tufte 1983), present numerous examples of good and bad work together with some general taste-based rules of thumb for constructing and assessing graphs. In what has now become a large and thriving field of research, more recent work provides excellent discussions of the cognitive underpinnings of successful and unsuccessful graphics, again providing many compelling and illuminating examples (Ware 2008). Other books provide good advice about how to graph data under different circumstances (Wilke 2019; Few 2009; Munzner 2014; Cairo 2013), but choose not to teach the reader about the tools used to produce the graphics they show. This may be because the software used is some (proprietary, costly) point-and-click application that requires a fully visual introduction of its own, such as Tableau, Microsoft Excel, or SPSS. Or perhaps the necessary software is freely available, but showing how to use it is not what the book is about (Cleveland 1994). Conversely, there are excellent cookbooks that provide code “recipes” for many kinds of plot (Chang 2013). But for that reason they do not take the time to introduce the beginner to the principles behind the output they produce. Finally, we also have thorough introductions to particular software tools and packages, including the one we will use in this book (Wickham et al. 2023). These can sometimes be hard for beginners to digest, as they may presuppose a background that the reader does not have."

"Each of the books I have just cited is well worth your time. When teaching people how to make graphics with data, however, I have repeatedly found the need for an introduction that motivates and explains why you are doing something but that does not skip the necessary details of how to produce the images you see on the page. And so this book has two main aims. First, I want you get to the point where you can reproduce almost every figure in the text for yourself. Second, I want you to understand why the code is written the way it is, such that when you look at data of your own you can feel confident about your ability to get from a rough picture in your head to a high-quality graphic on your screen or page."

Key Topics & Focus Areas for socviz.co:

In this Chapter

What’s New in This Edition?

What You Will Learn

The Right Frame of Mind

How to Use This Book

Conventions