Visualizing Time

Book excerpt: Art, or Science? Which of these is the right way to think of the field of visualization? This is not an easy question to answer, even for those who have many years experience in making graphical depictions of data with a view to help people understand it and take action. In this book, Graham Wills bridges the gap between the art and the science of visually representing data. He does not simply give rules and advice, but bases these on general principles and provide a clear path between them This book is concerned with the graphical representation of time data and is written to cover a range of different users. A visualization expert designing tools for displaying time will find it valuable, but so also should a financier assembling a report in a spreadsheet, or a medical researcher trying to display gene sequences using a commercial statistical package.