Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions

Toby Segaran, Jeff Hammerbacher

"O'Reilly Media, Inc.", Jul 14, 2009 - Computers - 386 pages

In this insightful book, you'll learn from the best data practitioners in the field just how wide-ranging -- and beautiful -- working with data can be. Join 39 contributors as they explain how they developed simple and elegant solutions on projects ranging from the Mars lander to a Radiohead video.

With Beautiful Data, you will:

• Explore the opportunities and challenges involved in working with the vast number of datasets made available by the Web
• Learn how to visualize trends in urban crime, using maps and data mashups
• Discover the challenges of designing a data processing system that works within the constraints of space travel
• Learn how crowdsourcing and transparency have combined to advance the state of drug research
• Understand how new data can automatically trigger alerts when it matches or overlaps pre-existing data
• Learn about the massive infrastructure required to create, capture, and process DNA data

That's only small sample of what you'll find in Beautiful Data. For anyone who handles data, this is a truly fascinating book. Contributors include:

Nathan Yau

Jonathan Follett and Matt Holm

J.M. Hughes

Raghu Ramakrishnan, Brian Cooper, and Utkarsh Srivastava

Jeff Hammerbacher

Jason Dykes and Jo Wood

Jeff Jonas and Lisa Sokol

Jud Valeski

Alon Halevy and Jayant Madhavan

Aaron Koblin with Valdean Klump

Michal Migurski

Jeff Heer

Coco Krumme

Peter Norvig

Matt Wood and Ben Blackburne

Jean-Claude Bradley, Rajarshi Guha, Andrew Lang, Pierre Lindenbaum, Cameron Neylon, Antony Williams, and Egon Willighagen

Lukas Biewald and Brendan O'Connor

Hadley Wickham, Deborah Swayne, and David Poole

Andrew Gelman, Jonathan P. Kastellec, and Yair Ghitza

Toby Segaran

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - albertgoldfain - LibraryThing

A thought-provoking tour of recent data-intensive research. I found it most useful for its "aha" and "I should have thought of that" moments. I also appreciated the numerous external references to free datasets and data processing tools.

User Review -

A book that briefly describes the efforts of intelligent people who have used various technologies to solve diverse problems in a creative and efficient manner. A good compilation and worth the money...

Contents

• Seeing Your Life in Data: 1
• Keeping Users in Mind When Designing Data Collection Methods: 17
• Embedded Image Data Processing on Mars: 35
• Cloud Storage Design in a PNUTShell: 55
• Information Platforms and the Rise of the Data Scientist: 73
• The Geographic Beauty of a Photographic Archive: 85
• Data Finds Data: 105
• Portable Data in Real Time: 119
• Surfacing the Deep Web: 133
• Building Radioheads House of Cards: 149
• Visualizing Urban Data: 167
• The Design of Senseus: 183
• What Data Doesnt Do: 205
• Natural Language Corpus Data: 219
• The Story of DNA: 243
• Beautifying Data in the Real World: 259
• Exploring Millions of Social Stereotypes: 279
• The Effect of the Housing Crisis: 303
• Beautiful Political Data: 323
• Connecting Data: 335
• Contributors: 349
• Index: 357

Bibliographic information

• Title: Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions; Theory in practice
• Authors: Toby Segaran, Jeff Hammerbacher
• Publisher: "O'Reilly Media, Inc.", 2009
• ISBN: 144937929X, 9781449379292
• Length: 386 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / General; Computers / Data Modeling & Design; Computers / Databases / Data Mining; Computers / Desktop Applications / General; Computers / General