Disappointed that there wasn't a critique of the usefulness of any of the networks. This is glossed over in much writing on visualization, whether or not these are useful and what makes one presentation more useful than another. The prose is over-the-top, over-written, it was a relief to read the essays by Yau, et al, in the last chapter. Chapter 5, "They Syntax of a New Language" was the best, perhaps because it was a straightforward cataloging. ( )

This is a collection of notable information visualizations, drawn from the online repository visualcomplexity.com curated by the author. The book is visually rich and well produced, and the examples are organized into themes and complemented with introductory texts and a couple of short commissioned essays. I find the structure to be workable and the historical introductions to tree and network structures are quite useful. The main drawback of the book, in my opinion, is that several of the examples are hard to understand and appropriate due to the sparse elaborations -- in some cases it feels that mere visual inspiration is the takeaway when more generative design knowledge could have been had if in-depth descriptions were available. Either way, an undeniable strength of the book is its archival function in a field were many design artifacts become technically outdated and disappear from online access within years.

Technical Library - shelved at: B17