Visualizing Data

I was (sadly) very disappointed with Ben Fry's Visualizing Data book. It wasn't as though it's a badly written or presented book - I just had vastly different expectations about it's content (the downside of buying unseen from Amazon, I guess).

Recently, via the MIX site and their Decry section, I found this link:

Data Visualization: Modern Approaches

which is EXACTLY what I wanted to read about in Visualizing Data. While discussion of the 'traditional' data visualization techniques (your standard graphs and pictograms, etc) is no doubt useful, in the RIA world of today we need to go the extra mile to make data not only easy-to-understand, but attractive too. There is also more and more data to understand, so incorporating multiple axes of data into a single visualization in a logical way is a secondary goal, often supported by dedicated 'designer' resources. It is these subjects that I wished were addressed in Visualizing Data, and look forward to reading about at Decry.

Other links that I like (notice the skew towards geographic data):

• Thematic Mapping and Heat Maps with Virtual Earth



• Newspaper Endorsements in the 2008 Election



• 2008 election results



• the awesome Thematic Mapping blog and the post/series on Thematic Mapping In Google Earth/

Part of my interest is related to Geoquery 2008 and what features it needs to be a useful thematic mapping/data visualization front-end for SQL Server 2008.