Abstract
The most important part of a visualization of data is the data themselves. If it does not show the data clearly, a visualization can be pretty, interesting, technically well executed, and all kinds of other good things, but it fails in its basic task. In this chapter we will look at data, and time-based data in particular, with a view to understanding how they can best be represented. Different forms of data require different visualization techniques. Just as a photographer will use different equipment to photograph a Formula-1 race from that used in their still-life studio, a good visualization designer will adapt his tools to the data, producing a portrayal of the data that faithfully and naturally represents the data.
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Notes
- 1.
Longitude denotes location around the globe, on the east–west axis parallel to the equator, whereas latitude denotes the location on the north–south axis between the equator and the poles. Latitude is relatively easy to calculate with simple instruments, unlike longitude. In terms of the spherical coordinate system defined in Sect. ??, latitude is theta and longitude is phi.
- 2.
The common alphabetical order is an imposed order on names. There is no reason except convenience and tradition that we might not order names by length, first vowels, number of syllables, or any other system.
- 3.
You might find a time where the seconds are actually 60. Although most likely this is an error, it is just possible that it is legal. On rare occasions a leap second is added to the calendar and is recorded as an extra second in a given minute, so on rare occasions a minute may be 61 seconds long.
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Wills, G. (2010). Types of Data. In: Visualizing Time. Statistics and Computing. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-77907-2_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-77907-2_4
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