Treemap
History of Treemap Ben Shneiderman is considered to be the inventor of Treemaps. He created treemaps as a way to visualize a vast file directory on a computer, without taking up too much space on the screen. Treemap has subsequently become an essential method for displaying hierarchical data using nested figures and rectangles in information […]
Tag Cloud
History of Tag Cloud The earliest printed example of a weighted list of English keywords was the “subconscious files” in Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs in 1995. This popularized tags becoming commonly used on geographic maps to represent the relative size of cities in terms of relative typeface size. The “tag cloud” rose to prominence in the […]
Stacked Bar Chart
History of Stacked Bar Chart Stacked bar charts evolved out of the bar charts which were first used in the 14th century and later published by William Playfair in The Commercial and Political Atlas to represent export and import of Scotland. Bar graphs evolved to be used for more complex comparisons of data with grouped […]
Spider Graph
History of Spider Graph The star plot was first used by Georg von Mayr in 1877. Radar charts differ from glyph plots in a way that multiple variables are used to construct the plotted star figure. There is no separation into foreground and background variables. Instead, the star-shaped figures are usually arranged in a rectangular […]
Pie Chart
History of Pie Chart Pie charts have been used across history however are first credited to be used by William Playfair’s in 1801 to represent Statistical Breviary of 1801 and the proportions of the Turkish Empire located in Asia, Europe, and Africa before 1789. In 1858 a French engineer named Charles Joseph Minard used pie […]
Line Chart
History of Line Chart Some of the earliest known line charts are generally credited to Francis Hauksbee, Nicolaus Samuel Cruquius, Johann Heinrich Lambert and William Playfair. Economist William Playfair, the author of “The Commercial and Political Atlas” (1786), used 43 line chart variants to explore time-series data about political and economic matters. Another use of […]
Heatmap
Heat Maps are most commonly used to display a more generalized view of numeric values as a graphical representation of data where the individual values contained in a matrix are represented as colors. It is commonly used as an isopleth representing regions of similar value using color splotches. Heatmaps use color the way a bar […]
Gantt Chart
A Gantt chart visualization shows activities (tasks or events) displayed against time, most commonly used for the purpose of project management and scheduling. On one axis is a list of the activities and along the other is a suitable time scale. Each activity is represented by a bar; where the position and length of the […]
Bubble Chart
A bubble chart represents data points replaced with bubbles, adding an additional dimension of the data represented through the size of the bubbles. As a variation of a scatter chart, a bubble chart similarly does not use a category axis — both horizontal and vertical axes are value axes. [chartdesc] History of Bubble Chart Bubble […]
Circular Barplot
A circular barplot is a plot where each bar is displayed along a circle instead of a line. Here no Y scale is displayed since exact values are written on each bar which could also be represented on interaction with the chart. The chart is popular for its visual appeal however and needs to be […]