Stephen Few’s “Now You See It”
November 07, 2011
Following up on Tufte’s books, I finished reading Stephen Few’s Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis.
I found it to be more useful than Tufte books, which mostly consist of loosely tied stories. In contrast, Few has a much more methodical approach and discusses all types of information visualization. He also points to software to make the many visualizations that are presented: often Excel, but also Tableau Software, Spotfire, Panopticon, TimeSearcher and others.
Here’s the table of contents for my own reference.
- Introduction
- Part I. Building core skills for visual analysis
- Information visualization
- Prerequisites for enlightening analysis
- Thinking with our eyes
- Analytical interaction and navigation
- Analytical techniques and practices
- Analytical patterns
- Part II. Honing skills for diverse types of visual analysis
- Time-series analysis
- Part-to-whole and ranking analysis
- Deviation analysis
- Distribution analysis
- Correlation analysis
- Multivariate analysis
- Part III. Further thoughts and hopes
- Promising trends in information visualization
- Wisdom in the age of information