Part 2. Visualize your own data

In part two of this book, we’ll dive down into some of the techniques that will help you provide compelling, effective visualizations, using both Gephi and KeyLines, and you’ll learn how to avoid some of the pitfalls that can confuse your chart readers. First, we’ll address styling: how to convey interesting, relevant information in your graphs and how to avoid unhelpful clutter. Second, we’ll discuss interactivity: how to get your users involved in your visualizations so that they can find what they want and look at the data at the level that’s appropriate for them. Then, we’ll discuss a few detailed topics for specific types of graphs, for example, how to work with dynamic graphs—graphs that change over time—and geospatial graphs—where the data contains spatial coordinates. In the technical appendix, I provide some sample source code to get started visualizing graphs with D3.js, a popular data visualization library.