As part of the resources for his online data visualization course, Alberto Cairo has posted several lists of recommended readings:
Some of these links lead to other excellent recommended-readings lists:
- Stephen Few on data visualization for human perception, and Few’s library
- Hacker Journalism 101
- Robert Kosara’s influences and their own influences
I figured I should focus on reading the book suggestions that came up more than once across these lists. Below is the ranking; it’s by author rather than book, since some authors were suggested with multiple books. So many good books!
The list, by number of citations per author:
8x
- Edward Tufte: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.
4x
- Colin Ware: Information Visualization: Perception for Design; Visual Thinking for Design
- Stuart Card, Jock Mackinlay and Ben Shneiderman, Readings in Information Visualization; also Stuart Card, Thomas Moran and Allen Newell, The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction
3x
- Jacques Bertin: The Semiology of Graphics
- William Cleveland: The Elements of Graphing Data; Visualizing Data
- Don Norman: Things that Make Us Smart; The Design of Everyday Things
2x
- Rudolf Arnheim: Toward a Psychology of Art; Visual Thinking
- Marta Braun: Picturing Time
- Stephen Few: Now You See It; Show Me the Numbers; Information Dashboard Design
- Ernst Gombrich: The Story of Art; Art and Illusion
- Robert Harris: Information Graphics
- Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
- Alan MacEachren: How Maps Work
- Steven Pinker: How the Mind Works
- Terry Slocum: Thematic Cartography and Geographic Visualization
1x Many other wonderful books!
I’m glad to see there is such a long tail of diverse influences. Although a few books are particularly popular, everybody is not repeating the same ones over and over. This looks like a great must-read list to me, although personally I would also recommend:
- Rafe Donahue: Fundamental Statistical Concepts in Presenting Data (free PDF)
- Stephen Kosslyn: Graph Design for the Eye and Mind [see my review]
- Howard Wainer: Visual Revelations [see my review]
- Leland Wilkinson: The Grammar of Graphics [see my review]
- Nathan Yau: Visualize This
…and my to-read list also includes:
- William Playfair: The Commercial and Political Atlas and Statistical Breviary
- Martin Theus and Simon Urbanek: Interactive Graphics for Data Analysis; also Antony Unwin, Martin Theus, and Heike Hofmann: Graphics of Large Datasets
- John Tukey: Exploratory Data Analysis
- Howard Wainer: Graphic Discovery; Picturing the Uncertain World
- Matthew Ward, Georges Grinstein, and Daniel Keim: Interactive Data Visualizations
PS — Tufte’s book was clearly the most-widely cited by far (although out of his four books, people only cited this one). If you haven’t read it already, it’s a great inspiration. However, he can be a bit extreme and I would take his advice with a grain of salt. Robert Kosara’s experience taking Tufte’s course is typical, from what I’ve heard.