Here are 100 books that W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits fans have personally recommended if you like
W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits.
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When I was at one of the lowest points of my life, color saved me. I started my color journey over a decade ago with a pack of Pantone postcards and walks around my neighborhood, and now I have the privilege of writing about color full-time. It’s amazing what a change of perspective color can bring. I hope that the books on this list spark something within you to add more joy to your day to day. Because life is too short not to have fun—especially with color!
As someone who studied history and who loves color, this book is the perfect hybrid of color with depth! Not only are there several unique shades of colors (it goes way beyond ROYGBIV), but the origins and historical context of them were fascinating!
It really helped me learn so much more about color. The biggest takeaway is that while sometimes people tend to view color as something for children, this proves historically how great of an impact it has on humans.
One of USA Today's "100 Books to Read While Stuck at Home During the Coronavirus Crisis"
A dazzling gift, the unforgettable, unknown history of colors and the vivid stories behind them in a beautiful multi-colored volume.
"Beautifully written . . . Full of anecdotes and fascinating research, this elegant compendium has all the answers." -NPR, Best Books of 2017
The Secret Lives of Color tells the unusual stories of seventy-five fascinating shades, dyes, and hues. From blonde to ginger, the brown that changed the way battles were fought to the white that protected against the plague, Picasso's blue period to…
I am a writer and editor with a background in art history, based in Berlin. My work has always been shaped by two complementary needs. First, I always felt a thirst for understanding and knowledge. Second, I was always on the hunt for brilliant design and beautiful visuals. Infographics were thus a natural terrain for me. Since 2012, I have published four comprehensive books in the field. This includes both surveys of contemporary work as well as studies in the history of the field.
In my work, I try to combine my love for brilliant visuals and my fascination for complex scientific topics. You can easily guess why the National Geographic Magazine has always been one of my favourites. Its first issue appeared in 1888, and from an early stage, NatGeo’s editors have made extensive use of excellent infographics and photography alongside their stories. For this book, National Geographic has teamed up with Taschen to assemble a marvellous collection of the best infographics ever published in the magazine. Attention: This is highly inspiring and – quite literally – a heavyweight.
Back in the days when the information age was a distant dream and the world a more mysterious place, National Geographic began its mission to reveal the wonders of history, popular science, and culture to eager audiences around the globe. Since that 1888 launch, the world has changed; empires have risen and crumbled and a galaxy of information is today only a click away. But National Geographic endures; its calm, authoritative voice is as respected as ever amid the surfeit of data in our daily lives.
In this new anthology, TASCHEN and National Geographic gather the magazine's best infographics of…
I am a writer and editor with a background in art history, based in Berlin. My work has always been shaped by two complementary needs. First, I always felt a thirst for understanding and knowledge. Second, I was always on the hunt for brilliant design and beautiful visuals. Infographics were thus a natural terrain for me. Since 2012, I have published four comprehensive books in the field. This includes both surveys of contemporary work as well as studies in the history of the field.
Maps are the most ancient type of infographic we know, and that comes as no surprise. Spatial navigation is one of the most important evolutionary skills that both animals and humans have developed. Recording this knowledge in maps requires both a thorough scientific understanding and considerable artistic skills. This beautiful coffee table book is a mind-blowing and timeless trip through the field of cartography. It charts the development from pre-historic maps carved in stone all the way to recent brain scans from the Human Connectome Project. Give me this book and I’ll be lost browsing through its visual treasures for several days.
300 stunning maps from all periods and from all around the world, exploring and revealing what maps tell us about history and ourselves.
Map: Exploring the World brings together more than 300 fascinating maps from the birth of cartography to cutting-edge digital maps of the twenty-fist century. The book's unique arrangement, with the maps organized in complimentary or contrasting pairs, reveals how the history of our attempts to make flat representations of the world has been full of beauty, ingenuity and innovation.
Selected by an international panel of curators, academics and collectors, the maps reflect the many reasons people make…
I’m the Science Director of the Science Museum Group, based at the Science Museum in London, and visiting professor at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, and Department of Chemistry, University College London. Every time I write a book I swear that it will be my last and yet I'm now working on my ninth, after earlier forays into the physics of Christmas and the love life of Albert Einstein. Working with Peter Coveney of UCL, we're exploring ideas about computation and complexity we tackled in our two earlier books, along with the revolutionary implications of creating digital twins of people from the colossal amount of patient data now flowing from labs worldwide.
Over a single year, Giorgia Lupi, an Italian living in New York, and Stefanie Posavec, an American in London, exchanged hand-drawn postcards to chart the granular details of their lives using clusters, plots, and graphs. We featured the outpourings of these talented “information designers” in a 2016 Science Museum exhibition on big data and these striking images, in turn, paved the way for their book, Dear Data, which provides a remarkable portrait of these artists. An intimate and human take on big datathat invites us all to ponder how to represent our own lives.
From an award-winning project comes an inspiring, collaborative book that makes data artistic, personal - and open to all
Each week for a year, Giorgia and Stefanie sent each other a postcard describing what had happened to them during that week around a particular theme. But they didn't write it, they drew it: a week of smiling, a week of apologies, a week of desires.
Presenting their fifty-two cards, along with thoughts and ideas about the data-drawing process, Dear Data hopes to inspire you to draw, slow down and make connections with other people, to see the world through a…
In sixth grade, my teacher tried to teach the class how to read line charts – and something fell into place for me. Ever since then, I’ve tried to sort data into forms that we can use to make sense of it. As a researcher at Microsoft, I consulted with teams across the organization – from sales to legal; and from Excel to XBox – to help them understand their data. At Honeycomb, I design tools for software operations teams to diagnose their complex systems. These books each gave me an “ah-hah” moment that made me think differently about the craft of creating visualization. They now sit on my shelf in easy reach – I hope you find them fascinating too.
I learned Tukey’s name about as soon as I learned that data visualization existed as more than a menu in Excel and a personal obsession. Tukey coined the term “exploratory data analysis,” and so tapped into a passion for swimming around in all the interesting rows and columns. Tukey was working before computers were widespread, and so I got a view of how he saw data: working against the constraints of pencil and paper; keeping your hand moving as fast as possible. While the explorations we can do with gigabytes of memory and powerful rendering are very different, the goal of getting information into your head as fast as possible is unchanged.
This title is part of the Pearson Modern Classics series. Pearson Modern Classics are acclaimed titles at a value price. Please visit www.pearson.com/statistics-classics-series for a complete list of titles.
The approach in this introductory book is that of informal study of the data. Methods range from plotting picture-drawing techniques to rather elaborate numerical summaries. Several of the methods are the original creations of the author, and all can be carried out either with pencil or aided by hand-held calculator.
0134995457 / 9780134995458 EXPLORATORY DATA ANALYSIS (CLASSIC VERSION), 1/e
In sixth grade, my teacher tried to teach the class how to read line charts – and something fell into place for me. Ever since then, I’ve tried to sort data into forms that we can use to make sense of it. As a researcher at Microsoft, I consulted with teams across the organization – from sales to legal; and from Excel to XBox – to help them understand their data. At Honeycomb, I design tools for software operations teams to diagnose their complex systems. These books each gave me an “ah-hah” moment that made me think differently about the craft of creating visualization. They now sit on my shelf in easy reach – I hope you find them fascinating too.
I’ve always felt a desire to make the world make sense through data – that numbers and structure could help unlock hidden meanings. When I read this novel, I felt seen: it’s told from the perspective of T. S. Spivet – a 12-year-old boy who has the same urge. Spivet thoroughly documents the world around him, sketching an ant he sees in the grass, and drawing schematics and maps of the spaces he travels through on his quest to travel to the Smithsonian Institution. The book’s margin is lavishly illustrated with Spivet’s diagrams – in seeing the world through his eyes, it felt like how I see it through my own.
A brilliant, boundary-leaping debut novel tracing twelve-year-old genius map maker T.S. Spivet's attempts to understand the ways of the world
When twelve-year-old genius cartographer T.S. Spivet receives an unexpected phone call from the Smithsonian announcing he has won the prestigious Baird Award, life as normal-if you consider mapping family dinner table conversation normal-is interrupted and a wild cross-country adventure begins, taking T.S. from his family ranch just north of Divide, Montana, to the museum's hallowed halls.
T.S. sets out alone, leaving before dawn with a plan to hop a freight train and hobo east. Once aboard, his adventures step into…
I have obsessed with maps my whole life, but I guess the main drive for studying them is my enjoyment of outdoor spaces, as a hiker, a mountaineer, and as a sailor: always with a paper map at hand. If you use GPS (a wonderful innovation) you will not only lose some of your precious orientation abilities but above all you will look less at the environment around you. I feel that paper maps do a great favor to my brain and to my enjoyment of places. The books below are a great tribute to maps; they helped me understand them better, and this affected the way I use them.
If you draw a map, you have many choices of symbols, colors, types of lines, sizes of characters, and so on. We may think these are just arbitrary choices perpetuated by tradition, but MacEachren successfully shows that we better conceive of those items as solutions to communication problems in a subtle dialogue with the Gestalt requirements of visual perception. Not any symbol will do. The symbols must be fit for minds like ours.
I learned a lot from this visual approach to maps.
Now available in paperback for the first time, this classic work presents a cognitive-semiotic framework for understanding how maps work as powerful, abstract, and synthetic spatial representations. Explored are the ways in which the many representational choices inherent in mapping interact with information processing and knowledge construction, and how the resulting insights can be used to make informed symbolization and design decisions. A new preface to the paperback edition situates the book within the context of contemporary technologies. As the nature of maps continues to evolve, Alan MacEachren emphasizes the ongoing need to think systematically about the ways people interact…
In sixth grade, my teacher tried to teach the class how to read line charts – and something fell into place for me. Ever since then, I’ve tried to sort data into forms that we can use to make sense of it. As a researcher at Microsoft, I consulted with teams across the organization – from sales to legal; and from Excel to XBox – to help them understand their data. At Honeycomb, I design tools for software operations teams to diagnose their complex systems. These books each gave me an “ah-hah” moment that made me think differently about the craft of creating visualization. They now sit on my shelf in easy reach – I hope you find them fascinating too.
A new edition of Bertin’s 1963 Semiology was released a few years ago, and my heart swelled with joy. For years, I’d worked off of bad photocopies of an inter-library loan book that had long since gone out of print. In this new edition, I could see how Bertin works through different dimensions and axes – when you want to plot two different quantitative axes over a map, what are your choices? What if you want to plot them over a graph, instead? What changes? I loved exploring these choices with Bertin, as he explores how different color mappings, iconic representations, and design choices change the way the reader interprets the graph.
Originally published in French in 1967, Semiology of Graphics is internationally recognized as a foundational work in the fields of design and cartography. Based on Jacques Bertin's practical experience as a cartographer, part one of this work is an unprecedented attempt to synthesize principles of graphic communication with the logic of standard rules applied to writing and topography. Part two brings Bertin's theory to life, presenting a close study of graphic techniques, including shape, orientation, colour, texture, volume, and size, in an array of more than 1,000 maps and diagrams.
Colin Koopman researches and teaches about technology ethics at the University of Oregon, where he is a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the interdisciplinary certificate program in New Media & Culture. His research pursuits have spanned from the history of efforts in the early twentieth century to standardize birth certificates to our understanding of ourselves as effects of the code inscribed into our genes. Koopman is currently at work on a book that will develop our understanding of what it takes to achieve equality and fairness in data systems, tentatively titled Data Equals.
Harcourt’s Exposed takes the reader inside the contemporary social, political, and legal configurations that haunt our online lives by paradoxically pulling on the strings of our desires and wants. Harcourt exposes how the insidious technologies of mega-cap high-tech coax out of us a desire to expose ourselves, that too-familiar desire to share so much (and so often too much) online. Harcourt is one of the leading voices in contemporary critical theory and at the same time a practicing death-penalty lawyer. He knows both the inside of our political-legal systems and can gain a broad view of the wider social dynamics of social media.
Social media compile data on users, retailers mine information on consumers, Internet giants create dossiers of who we know and what we do, and intelligence agencies collect all this plus billions of communications daily. Exploiting our boundless desire to access everything all the time, digital technology is breaking down whatever boundaries still exist between the state, the market, and the private realm. Exposed offers a powerful critique of our new virtual transparence, revealing just how unfree we are becoming and how little we seem to care.
Bernard Harcourt guides us through our new digital landscape, one that makes it so…
I write about race and technology, and specifically the histories of Black folks as they influence online activities, from memes and community-building to care networks and activist efforts. I use theory, research, and most importantly lived experiences to tell the story of Black digital practices. The books I choose here represent how diverse my thinking is when it comes to this topic: from fiction to non-fiction, these works are as fluid yet meaningful as I think identity is, on and offline.
Everyone has that one book that is the I-can’t-put-this-down book. Race After Technology was that book for me.
Ruha Benjamin writes in a way that is so down to earth, tackling heavy subjects like algorithms, systemic racism, and more in a way that is somehow accessible, scholarly, and whippingly smart all in one.
From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity.
Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the "New Jim Code," she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by…
