Foundations of Data Visualization

This is the first book that focuses entirely on the fundamental questions in visualization. Unlike other existing books in the field, it contains discussions that go far beyond individual visual representations and individual visualization algorithms. It offers a collection of investigative discourses that probe these questions from different perspectives, including concepts that help frame these questions and their potential answers, mathematical methods that underpin the scientific reasoning of these questions, empirical methods that facilitate the validation and falsification of potential answers, and case studies that stimulate hypotheses about potential answers while providing practical evidence for such hypotheses. Readers are not instructed to follow a specific theory, but their attention is brought to a broad range of schools of thoughts and different ways of investigating fundamental questions. As such, the book represents the by now most significant collective effort for gathering a large collection of discourses on the foundation of data visualization.