We’re excited to announce the publication of a new book by Richard Brath, Managing Partner, Commercial Innovations at Uncharted. Visualizing with Text is the fifth entry in the AK Peters Visualization Series edited by Tamara Munzner. This is Richard’s second book, following Graph Analysis and Visualization: Discovering Business Opportunity in Linked Data (2015), which he co-authored with David Jonker, Uncharted Senior Partner, Co-Founder and CEO.
In Visualizing with Text, Richard examines examples of text visualization both from a thousand years of historical documents and from contemporary sources. Using these as inspiration, he postulates an expanded design space that designers can apply “to enable richer, more expressive visualizations of data or text.” More than 240 example images from a variety of disciplines illustrate how labels, text formats and layouts can contribute to the design and development of new visualizations. Keen readers will recognize among them some visualizations produced by Uncharted.
Visualizing with Text is informed by, according to Richard, his “long history in the design and development of visualizations in industrial applications such as financial markets, supply chain, health care, call centre, [and] web analytics,” much of which occurred with Uncharted. The core of the book stems from research Richard performed while completing his part-time PhD and working full time at Uncharted, who he acknowledges
was highly supportive… [granting] time to attend conferences and meetings; access to staff for presentations, evaluations, feedback and critiques; access to various information visualization resources such as historic publications and access to some customers; assistance with collecting some datasets such as social media datasets; and so on.
Uncharted has a long history of leadership in designing and developing visual analytics of text. Our first visual analytic systems date back more than 15 years. Some recent examples that Richard has cited as inspiration for his book include:
- Visual Analytic System for Subject Matter Expert Document Tagging using Information Retrieval and Semi-Supervised Machine Learning
- Abstractive Tabular Dataset Summarization via Knowledge Base Semantic Embeddings
- TopicOnTiles: Tile-Based Spatio-Temporal Event Analytics via Exclusive Topic Modeling on Social Media
- STExNMF: Spatio-Temporally Exclusive Topic Discovery for Anomalous Event Detection
- Argument Mapper: Countering Cognitive Biases in Analysis with Critical (Visual) Thinking
- Graph Mapping: Multi-Scale Community Visualization of Massive Graph Data
Early praise for Visualizing with Text within the visualization community has been very encouraging:
Wow! This delightful book shows so many fresh ideas and novel visualizations that I had to rethink what I believed was possible. Richard Brath’s book expands my mind in ways I never thought possible. What fun!
–Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland
I am delighted to endorse Richard Brath’s upcoming book… as it serves a useful perspective of visualization with text. The repertoire of topics with thoughtful examples offers the reader an appreciation for the role of text in supporting a better semantic understanding of data.
–Vidya Setlur, Principal Research Scientist, Tableau Software
For more information on the contents of Visualizing with Text, see the links below.
About the book:
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