This is an apparently heterogeneous-by-design anthology of seven parts, each having at least one brilliantly magnificent chapter that should appear in every subsequent edition, and most having at least one mundane chapter that may have already been substantially irrelevant before the first publication; hence, some contradictory expressions of latent ambivalence are forthcoming. These seven computer-centric parts, the essential ideas, are generically entitled “Visual Communications”; “Theory and Science”; “Principles, Guidelines, and Recommendations”; “Methods”; “Perception and Cognition”; “Dynamic Visualization”; and “Interaction”--but don’t expect that the content of any of these exceedingly vaguely titled parts is in any particular way mutually exclusive of aspects that you will find in the other parts--and don’t expect any help from the index either, because there isn’t one. Nevertheless, scattered therein are (by my crude estimate, because there is no list of illustrations either) perhaps 100 exemplary visualizations (such as graphs, charts, flowcharts, network combinatorics, communications maps, schematic pictures, photographs, and computer-generated images); yet, there are probably more than 1,000 other types of visualizations that are mentioned in the text that carry no accompanying illustration.

Despair not, because there really are indeed some exceptionally positive chapters that convey modes of thinking about visualization and how to manifest graphic representations in situations where the complexity of the domain is to the detriment of any coherent observation of data structures, patterns, or relationships. Perhaps another view of this handbook is as an editor-directed tour of an ongoing debate between those who believe that a comprehensible visualization is the end product of a complexity reduction, and those who believe that the visualization is just one of any number of strategies for the human to arrive at concise statements and formulas that explain the primary, secondary, and tertiary characteristics of any dataset derived in the absence of such predetermined causal clarity. Still, a more optimistic praise of the editor is that he has reduced the current problems in the field of computer-actualized visualization to seven disjoint schools of thought, wherein the reader ultimately identifies with one part, and labors to appreciate the mandate and manifesto of the other six, and wherein each of the seven parts includes detailed expressions of conceptualization, motive, mechanism, and instantly dated examples of derivative works.

In all fairness, human-centric visualization is an overly broad topic, even when limited to heuristic and algorithmic strategies for the computer graphic representation of seemingly multivariate data ensembles, manifolds, and convolutions therein. This anthology demonstrates a longstanding, albeit well-known, need for a handbook, but the whole idea of a handbook is to save research and development (R&D) from reinvention, from tiresome ergonomic calibration, and from setting parameters for values that are already known to be empirically impractical. A handbook beacons readers to find narrow answers and focused discussions to well-formulated questions from the collective wisdom of working professionals; this is not a handbook, but it does contain such a large collection of relevant information, and so many diverse overviews and insights into the world of unanswered needs for visualization, that it could be transformed into the basis for a outstanding handbook.

Without applying any computer-centric visualization modes to help eager readers understand relationships between so many fascinating aspects discussed therein, this traditional anthology of scholarly technical articles falls short of its own instant proof-of-concept potential, apparently because any of what might be relevant graphic representations are so labor and software intensive that they would have forced the editor outside any frame of reasonable timeliness.