As Alfred Blumstein noted in the Foreword, we started out to edit a book describing the new visualization techniques that have recently been developed for research into crime and criminal justice. We felt that this was an important goal, since articles in social science and criminology journals usually present data analyses in tables, which can be mind-numbing, rather than in fi gures and charts. In contrast, most articles in hard science journals are usually fi lled with graphical representations of data rather than relying entirely on tables. Our feeling was that not enough attention has been paid to those techniques in the social sciences (Maltz, 1994 ). Specifi c to sociology, Healy and Moody ( 2014 ) argue that in its infancy sociology did, in fact, employ innovative visualizations, e.g., Du Bois ’s The Philadelphia Negro ’s (1898/1967) choropleth maps, time series, and table-and-histogram combinations, but that in later years the employment of visualizations was hampered by thoughts that compared to causal-inferential modeling they were unduly descriptive, were thought to be unsophisticated, and tended to lag behind the computational abilities of the day (p. 107).