Ever since I read the book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward R. Tufte, I am captivated by the idea of creating good design while doing data analysis or dashboard building. Although Excel 2007 charts are much nicer than its previous births, I have started disliking Excel charts. I am even developing an eye for picking out the bad information pixels. Apart from Tufte’s books, these books have helped me immensely:
- The Elements of Graphing Data, by William S. Cleveland
- Information Dashboard Design, by Stephen Few
Administrators/executives neither have the time nor the patience to understand complicated data mining algorithms and its results, and when they don’t understand them most probably they will never go in “production.” Simple, yet informative, designs and charts have better chances of going in production, which I am sure every data miner longs for.
I found a course web-site on Information Visualization: http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/120/lectures.html