The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge

(Hardback)

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Description

Trees are in nature but also in our minds. Their shape have influenced how we communicate via diagrams, link ideas together and illustrate deeper human thoughts in art throughout history. Trees have been a recurrent metaphor for mapping information in numerous scientific domains, such as biology, genetics, sociology and linguistics and information visualisation is a growing area of interest amongst a variety of business practices. This book will expose our long-lasting obsession with trees, as metaphors for organising and representing hierarchical information, and provide a broad visual framework for the various types of executions, many dating back hundreds of years.

Reviews

Featuring 200 examples across history, this one-of-a-kind resource is my round-up's crowning glory. - World of Interiors
From studying the bible to visualising computer storage, Manuel Lima's sumptuous The Book of Trees explores the tree diagram's appeal for showing information. -NewScientist magazine
Lima's argument is not only compelling, it is also convincing, for his visual evidence is powerful. - American Historical Association
Lima's book present us with a pictorial buffet of the sheer variety of Trees of Knowledge, both in terms of what they can look like and what information they can convey. - Systematic Biology
Nowhere will you find a more comprehensive overview of treemaps than The Book of Trees by Manuel Lima, professor of data visualization at Parsons. - Azure Magazine
Sure to appeal to a diverse group of readers, the book beautifully combines art and science, as well as ancient and contemporary worldviews. -Publishers Weekly
What an amazing and beautiful book! The most important analysis of visualization since Tufte, The Book of Trees reveals the origins and evolution of the branches we use to structure knowledge. These are the cultural and logical foundations crucial to any digital designer, as well as anyone who wants to be able to think critically about the visual world. -Douglas Rushkoff, author, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

Author Bio

Manuel Lima is a Senior UX Design Lead at Microsoft and founder of VisualComplexity.com - A visual exploration on mapping complex networks. He is the author of Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information (Princeton Architectural Press).