randomosity

Beau­ti­ful Data is a col­lec­tion of essays on explor­ing the organ­isa­tion, manip­u­la­tion and dis­play of data in ‘beau­ti­ful way’. The edit­ors, Toby Segaran and Jeff Ham­merbacher, have attemp­ted to loosely organ­ise the papers into logical pro­cess of: col­lec­tion –> stor­age –> organ­isa­tion –> retrieval –> visu­al­isa­tion –> ana­lysis and in the­ory this works. The chal­lenge as with any col­lec­tion of papers from such a diverse set of authors (39 in this case) is find­ing that com­mon thread that flows through the works. In this the edit­ors achieve a passing grade, but frankly, this is sort of the book that offers the reader some­thing they will find use­ful, but only due to the breadth of art­icles included. The down­side is that there will cer­tainly be art­icles that a reader will not. The authors seem to real­ise this and use the term ‘loose’ with some fre­quency. But I can’t cri­ti­cise this and would want to. This is a strength of the book. It cov­ers much ground and will appeal to many.

Con­cep­tu­ally, the demand for a book in this area is huge. Hav­ing delivered a num­ber of work­shops in this area and been asked to adju­dic­ate on con­fer­ence papers in the past two years, I am cer­tainly aware of breadth, and the demand for skills and know­ledge in this broad area.

The first art­icle by Nathan Yau, builds from his pop­u­lar blog posts on flowingdata.com and provides more depth on two case stud­ies involving the col­lec­tion, ana­lysis and visu­al­isa­tion of data gathered from going about your own life. He is paint­ing a pic­ture of life to come as more of our life becomes mon­itored and we are raised to a new level of con­scious­ness of how we live. His art­icle explores how we might inter­n­al­ise the ana­lysis of this data and how it could impact on life activ­it­ies. This is a fla­vour of many of the art­icles in the book. They are on the cut­ting edge and offer spec­u­lat­ive obser­va­tion of how we are being impacted by emer­ging tech­no­lo­gies and in this col­lec­tion, you will find great food for thought. If there is any cri­ti­cism to this it is in that much of this inform­a­tion comes from con­trib­ut­ors that share their inform­a­tion via blogs and much seems famil­iar. If you sense a little trep­id­a­tion in my review you can feel the hes­it­a­tion in my fin­gers as I type. I like the concept and I really like many of the art­icles. Peter Norvig’s ‘Nat­ural Lan­guage Cor­pus Data’ is par­tic­u­larly well craf­ted as is Dykes and Wood’s on ‘The Geo­graphic Beauty of a Pho­to­graphic Archive’. Both of these are tar­geted at beau­ti­ful data in the purest sense, the inner explor­a­tion of data as beau­ti­ful in itself when craft­fully addressed.

This col­lec­tion is a needed and val­ued con­tri­bu­tion to a pop­u­lar dis­cus­sion. The edit­ors have done an admir­able job of loc­at­ing a way to sys­tem­at­ic­ally tie the con­tri­bu­tions together. The author’s of the spe­cific con­tri­bu­tions have also focussed on use­ful adapt­a­tions of the­ory to actual demon­strable prac­tice. The breadth of the book is extens­ive and I guess my hes­it­atcy is just because this breadth is some­what over­whelm­ing. I would cer­tainly recom­mend this book to any­one even remotely inter­ested in any of the aspects that the book addressed in the broad field of data man­age­ment, manip­u­la­tion and present­a­tion. You are sure to find a few art­icles of par­tic­u­lar interest and pos­sible pique new interest in area you may well not have pre­vi­ously explored. It is a very use­ful com­pan­ion to Beau­ti­ful Visu­al­isa­tion edited by Steele and Ili­in­sky, both of whom con­trib­ute to this volume.