Visualization Analysis and Design

Preface

Why a New Book?

I wrote this book to scratch my own itch: the book I wanted to teach out of for my graduate visualization (vis) course did not exist. The itch grew through the years of teaching my own course at the University of British Columbia eight times, co-teaching a course at Stanford in 2001, and helping with the design of an early vis course at Stanford in 1996 as a teaching assistant.

I was dissatisfied with teaching primarily from original research papers. While it is very useful for graduate students to learn to read papers, what was missing was a synthesis view and a framework to guide thinking. The principles and design choices that I intended a particular paper to illustrate were often only indirectly alluded to in the paper ...