Two Books

I received two books via Amazon this summer that I truly devoured. The first is called Beautiful Data. Each chapter in this book comprises a separate essay written about data. The topics range from data collection to data storage to data analysis–and all were fascinating. For example, Aaron Koblin with Valdean Klump contributed a chapter entitled Building Radiohead’s House of Cards. 

This is the story of how the Grammy-nominated music video for Radiohead's "House of Cards” was created entirely with data. Before you read the chapter, you should watch the video. The definitive source for the video is the project’s Google Code page: http://code.google.com/radiohead. On that site, you’ll also find several other resources, including sam- ples of the data we used to build the video, a Flash application that lets you view the data in 3-D, some code you can use to create your own visualizations, and a making-of video. Definitely check it out.

There were several cool things about this book, not the least of which was the royalties for the book were being donated to Creative Commons and the Sunlight Foundation.

The second book that really excited me this summer was Nathan Yau's Visualize This. Nathan is the creator of Flowing Data, one of the best blogs on data that exists. In his book, he explains how to create some super-sweet (it's a technical term) visualizations of data. I can't say enough nice things about this book. And....it's aesthetically pleasing to look at.