Category: 2014 Books

Visual Trees: The Book of Trees by Manuel Lima

Apart from the iconic and mysterious Australian  Nullarbor http://www.nullarbornet.com.au/ (literally ‘no’, or actually very few, trees) and the baddest and saddest of outer suburban concrete jungles, trees are a major part of our daily life. Trees produce shade and oxygen, and provide inspiration for dreaming scientists watching apples fall. ‘Tree of life’. ‘Family trees’. Tree branches have also long provided a metaphor for branches of knowledge and classification systems.

In his excellent new book ‘The book of trees: visualizing branches of knowledge’,

https://www.papress.com/html/book.details.page.tpl?isbn=9781616892180

Manual Lima, Designer and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/) examines the role of trees in history, religion, philosophy, biology, computer science, data visualization, information graphics and data analysis / statistics.

Covering various types of tree graphs, including radial trees, sunbursts, Ben Schneiderman’s Treemaps and Voronoi Treemaps, Lima’s treatise provides inspirational historical and contemporary pictures, including timely applications such as looking at the words that appear with ‘I’ and ‘you’ in Google texts.

Statistical applications covered are mainly confined to Icicle plots or trees, used in applications such as cluster analysis, or the grouping observations into related classes, ‘taxa’ or clusters such as disease categories.

Not published in the Northern hemisphere until April 2014, the book is available now in Melbourne, Australia for around $50, e.g. www.ngvshop.ngv.vic.gov.au (the online search does not work) or http://metropolisbookshop.com.au

Accompanied by sources of information on how to construct such diagrams (e.g. http://www.flowingdata.com ) Lima’s new book will serve as an accessible and constant source of information on visualizing trees for new, as well as existing, ‘arborists’.

‘Velut arbor aevo’

‘May the Tree Thrive’!

 

Treemap software

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap/

http://www.treemap.com/

http://www.tableausoftware.com/

2014 Books: Medical Illuminations and another Trout in the Milk

The first cab off the rank for 2014 is Howard Wainer’s ‘Medical Illuminations: Using Evidence, Visualization & Statistical Thinking to Improve Healthcare’, Oxford University Press,  2014. It costs around $40 Australian.

Dr Wainer has written several great graphics books, including 2005’s ‘Graphic Discovery: a Trout in the Milk and Other Visual Adventures’, Princeton University Press.

The new book has more of a medical theme, including extremely useful chapters on medical prediction, the importance of showing diabetes patients real-time  and understandable information on their blood sugar levels, and the over-use of pie charts.

Although not mentioned in the above books, Florence Nightingale, Nursing pioneer and first female Fellow of what was to become the Royal Statistical Society, developed and used graphs and charts (admittedly an early form of pie chart). Ms Nightingale used such graphs to clearly show Queen Victoria, who wasn’t a statistician and wouldn’t have appreciated heaps and heaps of tables, the very real problems that soldiers were facing in the Crimean War due to poor sanitation.

Since then, much medical data is routinely collected and statistically analysed, but there is still a long way to go in terms of portraying and illuminating that information to medical staff and the patients and carers themselves.  Books like Medical Illuminations, supplemented by general info on the ‘how’ of graphic presentation using readily available software (Wainer’s texts focus mainly on the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘why’), will help to achieve such an important goal.

Recommended, for non-statisticians and statisticians alike!

Oxford University Press website: http://www.oup.com.au/titles/academic/medicine/9780199668793