Today I received my copy of Beautiful Data, a just-released anthology of articles about, well, working with data. Lukas and I contributed a chapter on analyzing social perceptions in web data. See it here. After a long process of drafting, proofreading, re-drafting, and bothering the publishers under rather sudden deadlines, I’ve resolved to never use graphics again in anything I write :)

Here’s our final figure, a k-means clustering of face photos via perceived social attributes (social concepts/types? with exemplars?):



I just started reading the rest of the book and it’s very fun. Peter Norvig‘s chapter on language models is gripping. (It does word segmentation, ciphers, and more, in that lovely python-centric tutorial style extending his previous spell correction article.) There are also chapters by many other great researchers and practitioners (some of whom you may have seen around this blog or its neighborhood) like Andrew Gelman, Hadley Wickham, Michal Migurski, Jeffrey Heer, and still more… I’m impressed just by the talent-gathering-and-organizing operation. Big kudos to editors Toby Segaran and Jeff Hammerbacher, and O’Reilly’s Julie Steele.

I also have an apparently secret code that gets you a discount, so email me if you want it. I wonder if I’m not supposed to give out many of them. Hm.