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Preface xvii

This book offers a considerably more extensive model and

framework than Spence’s Information Visualization [Spence 07].
Wilkinson’s The Grammar of Graphics [Wilkinson 05] is a deep and
thoughtful work, but it is dense enough that it is more suitable for
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vis insiders than for beginners. Conversely, Few’s Show Me The

Numbers [Few 12] is extremely approachable and has been used at
the undergraduate level, but the scope is much more limited than
the coverage of this book.
The recent book Interactive Data Visualization [Ward et al. 10]
works from the bottom up with algorithms as the base, whereas I
work from the top down and stop one level above algorithmic con-
siderations; our approaches are complementary. Like this book, it
covers both nonspatial and spatial data. Similarly, the Data Visu-
alization [Telea 07] book focuses on the algorithm level. The book
on The Visualization Toolkit [Schroeder et al. 06] has a scope far be-
yond the vtk software, with considerable synthesis coverage of the
concerns of visualizing spatial data. It has been used in many sci-
entific visualization courses, but it does not cover nonspatial data.
The voluminous Visualization Handbook [Hansen and Johnson 05]
is an edited collection that contains a mix of synthesis material
and research specifics; I refer to some specific chapters as good re-
sources in my Further Reading sections at the end of each chapter
in this book.

Audience
The primary audience of this book is students in a first vis course,
particularly at the graduate level but also at the advanced under-
graduate level. While admittedly written from a computer scien-
tist’s point of view, the book aims to be accessible to a broad audi-
ence including students in geography, library science, and design.
It does not assume any experience with programming, mathemat-
ics, human–computer interaction, cartography, or graphic design;
for those who do have such a background, some of the terms that
I define in this book are connected with the specialized vocabu-
lary from these areas through notes in the margins. Other au-
diences are people from other fields with an interest in vis, who
Copyright 2015. A K Peters/CRC Press.

would like to understand the principles and design choices of this

field, and practitioners in the field who might use it as a reference
for a more formal analysis and improvements of production vis
applications.
I wrote this book for people with an interest in the design and
analysis of vis idioms and systems. That is, this book is aimed

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