[HN Gopher] A periodic table of visualization methods (2007)
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A periodic table of visualization methods (2007)
Author : Daub
Score : 266 points
Date : 2024-01-15 07:26 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.visual-literacy.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.visual-literacy.org)
| Daub wrote:
| Its a bit old now, but full of fascinating material.
| alanbernstein wrote:
| I like the idea, but I'm confused. Why go to all the effort to
| think about visualization methods, then shoehorn them into the
| shape of the chemical element periodic table, without even making
| use of the periodic structure of the table? Funny enough,
| "periodic table" isn't its own item on this chart.
|
| I think it would be more useful and interesting to group by type
| in some way, perhaps with a bit of tree structure. Which reminds
| me of a loosely related idea: I'd like to see a tree diagram of
| different tree data structures, where the tree structure reflects
| the relationships of historical development and/or data structure
| behavior...
| albert_e wrote:
| Also a good meta example of picking a poor visualization method
| for the given data?
|
| This makes me curious --
|
| Has there been any good application of "periodic table" as a
| visualization method for anything other than chemical elements?
|
| If we are thinking of a grid where "rows" and "columns" imply
| some common properties .. then I am sure there are a few examples
| of matrix / quadrant/ grid formats that help convey that.
|
| But specifically "periodic table" is overused IMO.
|
| If applied correctly, I would expect every Nth element along X
| dimension resembles each other so it makes sense to wrap it and
| show it as a next row so that we get common properties along Y
| dimension as well.
| jnellis wrote:
| It's possible that the correct visualization, the nutritional
| food pyramid, became too unwieldy with this many visualization
| methods.
| hyperthesis wrote:
| The period table is less a visualization method than an
| accurate model.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >Has there been any good application of "periodic table" as a
| visualization method for anything other than chemical elements?
|
| No, because as can be seen in all of them the structure of the
| table maps to the structure of the chemical elements.
|
| The visualization of chemical elements is successful because it
| is an accurate representation of how chemical elements work, it
| does not just represent data but also is mapped to a model of
| how that data can conceivably change in the future.
|
| Every periodic table of X that is not chemical elements is
| stupid and does not work because
|
| 1. come on - what are the odds that some other subject in the
| universe has a similar model to chemical elements.
|
| 2. the visualization is not done to best represent the data but
| the data is bent as best as it can be to fit into the periodic
| table structure.
|
| And what is meant by periodic structure here - it is meant a
| selection of cells laid out in a very specific way with a color
| scheme so that if you saw it far enough away you would
| instantly think - hey, it's a periodic table!
|
| The periodic table used this way is not a data visualization
| method, it is a visualization parody method.
|
| on edit: also pisses me off because in my world a parody should
| at least be funny, darn it. sorry for the rant, this stuff
| really pisses me off.
| 0thgen wrote:
| I wonder if a "tree" would be a better visualization methods
| for visualization methods
| kevindamm wrote:
| Even a Venn diagram would be better than a periodic table.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| maybe some sort of directed graph.
|
| for example one thing I might want to have to describe
| visualization methods would be what graphical elements
| would be important to it.
|
| In the case of the periodic table an important graphical
| element would be color (the color used carries date), an
| unimportant one would be typography.
|
| this is obviously just thinking aloud here.
|
| perhaps also some visualization methods would benefit by
| reference to their creators. sparklines for example. So it
| seems to me a graph of some sort would be useful.
| 0thgen wrote:
| well I think there's a natural hierarchy that emerges
| from the examples given in the periodic table link.
|
| Spatial: line graphs, scatterplots, and even barplots and
| pie charts(1-dimensional space). Id throw spectogram and
| anything with time in there as well.
|
| Geographic: maps (this could be a subset of spatial)
|
| Graphical: graphs, mind-maps, flow charts, all the other
| graphs-like charts from the examples
|
| Visual Metaphors: those weird examples of they give of
| steps and a bridge, a slide, etc
|
| Those 4 categories alone capture all the examples from
| the webpage, and there are plenty of subcategories within
| them.
|
| So to me a hierarchy / tree seems like a good choice,
| which is essentially a directed graph (like you
| suggested)
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Has there been any good application of "periodic table" as
| a visualization method for anything other than chemical
| elements?_
|
| Only https://moderntoss.com/periodic-table-of-swearing that I
| can think of, and I disagree with several ordering choices on
| that, and some of the options made up to fill gaps are not at
| all good.
|
| The problem with a lot of things people try to mush into
| something that looks like the periodic table is that most
| datasets:
|
| * Have too few items
|
| * Have too many items
|
| * Simply don't fit into a near table, needing more dimensions,
| or having two obvious dimensions that line up into a grid less
| well than the elements do.
|
| Heck, even the elements don't _really_ fit. It just happens
| that it works & looks OK if you break out a load from the
| bottom left to stop it being too wide. As someone else has
| already said: the periodic table is more a document of a model,
| that by chance happens to work well enough as a visualisation.
| FeelingGood wrote:
| > _Has there been any good application of "periodic table" as a
| visualization method for anything other than chemical
| elements?_
|
| There is The Azure Periodic Table:
| https://www.azureperiodictable.com/
| ngc7293 wrote:
| The key here is they didn't try to match the elements table's
| shape.
| paulddraper wrote:
| There are plenty of things that make sense in a grid.
|
| (E.g. a lawful/chaotic good/evil grid.)
|
| But the periodic table itself is based on chemical/physical
| properties of elements, so of course nothing else will ever fit
| that shape precisely.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| I think it's an amusing display of a bunch of different
| visualization methods.
|
| It's fun to browse. No need to take it more seriously than it
| takes itself.
|
| From their white paper conclusion:
|
| --- Our efforts in structuring the vast domain of visualization
| methods cannot be seen as a close adaptation of the periodic
| table of chemical elements. It is rather a functional,
| metaphoric homage to it. The choice of methods included as well
| as the order criteria cannot be considered exhaustive.
| Nevertheless, it does provide an overview over more than
| hundred useful visualization methods of great variety and by
| organizing them assists researchers and practitioners alike in
| choosing adequate visualization methods for their needs. On
| demand the user is provided with further useful information
| through signs. We encourage the reader to playfully explore the
| different properties of the visualization methods presented. So
| he may consider more than one method for his next visualization
| requirement and to use them in a combined, complementary
| manner. This may not turn lead into gold, but turn complex
| issues into accessible explanations. ---
|
| I do accept that a not insignificant segment of HN users would
| much prefer a man-page-like display, all-text, no graphics, no
| css, no javascript-- even for a page about visualizations!
|
| "Concept" and "Information" should have more distinguishable
| colors though.
| dahart wrote:
| > I do accept that a not insignificant segment of HN users
| would much prefer a man-page-like display, all-text, no
| graphics, no css, no javascript-- even for a page about
| visualizations!
|
| I like your glass-half-full positive take, but I'm not sure
| this is accurate; most posts on anything graphical that link
| to a github page have lots and lots of complaints about the
| lack of screenshots or examples. People overwhelmingly like
| pictures, especially on pages about viz, and parent wasn't at
| all suggesting or implying not to use a picture, but maybe
| implicitly to use a better & more relevant picture. The
| question here is whether the periodic table metaphor offers
| _anything_ of value to a collection of viz examples, or if it
| actually confuses the viewer by suggesting or implying some
| kind of meaning or organization when there is none. There's
| not a small amount of irony in using a bad metaphor for
| visualizing something in an article that is specifically
| discussing how to use good metaphors for visualization,
| right?
| bookofjoe wrote:
| >PERIODIC TABLES OF ALMOST EVERYTHING EXCEPT ELEMENTS
|
| https://www.pinterest.com/brianhousand/periodic-tables-of-al...
| Daub wrote:
| Absolutely brilliant. Thanks.
| leecarraher wrote:
| periodic table of finite simple groups is pretty awesome
| https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/99brzy/the_periodic_t...
|
| they're groups so symmetries are kinda what they do. There are
| families etc. in columns, with the final column being the
| generator. Then the sporadic groups are the rare earth elements
| which don't define a family of groups. order is increasing on
| the way down, and the very obvious cyclic groups are the noble
| gases equivalent.
| Xophmeister wrote:
| The International Phonetic Alphabet might be a good contender.
| There's no periodicity, but the columns for the consonants
| roughly represent place of articulation. The spacial
| arrangement of vowels is even closer to where in the mouth the
| sound is formed.
| bigger_cheese wrote:
| When I was learning to read Japanese the Hiragana alphabet was
| displayed in a somewhat periodic table-esque format. The vowel
| ending sounds were the vertical axis (a,i,u,e,o) then next
| column was ka, ki, ku, ke, ko - then sa, shi, su, se, so etc.
| RagnarD wrote:
| I'd like to see the practice of stuffing arbitrary topics into
| the periodic table become an object of scorn and eyerolls. Doing
| so degrades both the topic and the science of chemistry.
| rramadass wrote:
| Very nice and useful!
|
| I had long wanted a catalog of the various
| visual/graphical/diagramming techniques in one place as a
| reference and this seems to be a good one.
|
| Any other sites/books etc. that people can recommend on this
| topic?
| kvakvs wrote:
| This is something i'd prefer to save forever. Who knows if i need
| it in 5-25 years and the website is not there anymore.
| Aachen wrote:
| If you didn't already know of archiving websites, you're one of
| today's lucky ten thousand!
|
| See https://archive.org :)
| dw-im-here wrote:
| This is the polonium of visualization
| badcppdev wrote:
| That's an analogy I can work with. Lots of those visualisation
| methods are not fit for human consumption. And in fact a whole
| lot of them are just grey blobs that shouldn't be near humans
| at all.
|
| (just my opinion from a random sampling)
| dw-im-here wrote:
| It made my hair fall out
| throwaway2562 wrote:
| This is a very forced metaphor, in that many elements don't fit
| well into their groups, and could reasonably sit elsewhere.
|
| The x, y axes means something in periodic tables, but nothing
| here.
|
| Typography hence readability is extremely poor. And so on.
|
| Not sure about this at all.
| awestroke wrote:
| Why is the "noble" (rightmost) column filled with garbage
| visualization methods? Seems like very very little thought went
| into the "period table" aspect of this
| greggsy wrote:
| The 'noble' ones aren't always garbage - they have their place,
| but are mostly replaced by 'user stories' and 'rich picture'
| concepts.
| mapreduce wrote:
| I don't know if I am missing something obvious. What is the
| periodicity in these visualization methods? Like I am looking at
| the 2nd column: cartesian coordinates, line chart, area chart,
| scatterplot, spectogram. What periodic property is being repeated
| among them?
| mo_42 wrote:
| There's no periodicity in visualization. The design space of
| visualization is much more complex the atomic number.
|
| Also, this "periodic table" does not show the three main
| branches of visualization: Information Visualization,
| Scientific Visualization, and Geographic Visualization.
|
| For example, this page gives an overview of time-oriented
| visualization with meta information like the original paper:
| https://browser.timeviz.net/
|
| It also seems to be maintained by people working in that area.
| fjkdlsjflkds wrote:
| My favorite part is that there is no such thing as a
| "spectogram" (I assume they mean a "spectrogram").
|
| The whole thing is hilariously bad :) love it.
| jpalomaki wrote:
| Great idea, but maybe it would be easier to use if you were using
| tags or something similar. You could show all the images at once
| and allow user to filter the view.
| graphviz wrote:
| This is interesting and a little bit entertaining.
|
| There has been excellent work on taxonomies for data
| visualization. Tamara Munzner's book "Visualization Analysis and
| Design" is a good starting point.
|
| There has been excellent work on identifying "dimensions" or
| properties of data visualization. Lee Wilkinson's "Grammar of
| Graphics" is a landmark. You could search backward to find
| Bertin's Semiology of Graphics, or forward to find ongoing work
| like UW's Vega https://idl.cs.washington.edu/papers/vega-lite/
|
| Some of this work might somewhat capture the properties of a
| periodic table to organize a catalog and even support further
| discovery.
| eye_dle wrote:
| Good intention but kind of hard to read.
|
| 1) It's not clear for me how color segmentation groups were
| picked in the first place. Are they mutually exclusive?
|
| 2) Would be great to make this interactive. There is a
| substantial cognitive effort to imagine these methods from the
| name of few words (good exercise but come on).
| beAbU wrote:
| I feel like all these "periodic table of X" things completely
| miss the point of why the periodic table of elements is the way
| it is, and why it's a fantastic tool to organize elements and
| nothing else.
| btbuildem wrote:
| Wow, this is terrible. It's an inappropriate metaphor, it's badly
| executed, the examples for each category are hardly
| representative and often spectacularly bad (bar chart!?), and to
| call it "incomplete" would be a severe understatement.
|
| This is a great example of how not to organize and display
| information.
| zubairq wrote:
| Great set of visualisations ! This will be my goto quick lookup
| next time I am thinking how to visualise data
| bane wrote:
| I ironically love this and think it's (un)intentially hilarious.
| It's basically everything people who think very seriously about
| infoviz warn about, crammed into a single terrible visualization
| on the subject of visualization. It's such an erudite
| accumulation of inexpert concepts it almost _has_ to have been
| put together (paradoxically) by an expert in the field.
|
| I looked it up, and indeed it was put together by a couple
| serious folks [1]. Even extensively cites Tufte.
|
| I reminds me of the movie "Bad CGI Gator" from last year.
|
| This is so wonderfully hard to parse as either parody or serious.
| Brilliant.
|
| 1 - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1712936.1712954
| dahart wrote:
| Wait, is it parody? I would agree if it was, but I assumed it
| was serious, and kinda bad. Their "knowledge maps" page on the
| site looks similar - the examples are ugly & awful.
| https://www.visual-literacy.org/maps/ This all looks like it's
| intended to be serious, considered good by the authors,
| especially considering the associated academic publication, and
| not some kind of intentionally funny commentary on bad
| visualizations. If that's the case, it doesn't seem
| particularly brilliant.
|
| Aside from the nonsensical analogy to the periodic table (which
| they admit in the paper), the thing that bugs me about it is
| that it's nowhere near complete, it does not cover all basic
| elements of visualization (also which they are aware of and
| discuss in the paper), so just completely misses the
| fundamental idea. It amounts to a hundred random examples of
| info-viz, most of which look mediocre to bad.
| bane wrote:
| oh my. Maybe it is? The university they're attached to seems
| to be a real, serious, school. But these examples are
| just...worst of the worst stuff. Inscrutable metaphors,
| wasted axes, variable fonts without meaning, organization
| schemes that make no sense...the tribute to Ben Shneiderman
| literally breaks most of his interface design rules and his
| goals and theories on infoviz. [1]
|
| I understand that much of this material is relatively old,
| but we actually were better back then.
|
| The "tell" to me (if this is parody) is the percent of the
| audience here who can't tell if this is serious, or good, or
| not.
|
| Perhaps somebody should count the comments and put them in a
| pie chart inside of a pie store and call it "HN taste tests
| visual-literacy.org".
|
| Okay, I'm calling it, this is a very inside joke page of some
| sort.
|
| 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Shneiderman#Designing_t
| he_...
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| A nice zoo of time series visualizations is here (and a link to a
| free Springer e-book): https://browser.timeviz.net/
| mjvmroz wrote:
| The point of the periodic table is that it supplies important
| structural information about each object in the set.
|
| Using the shape of the periodic table rather than its philosophy
| when the stated intent is to teach about appropriate data
| representation is an immediate wtf for me.
| leecarraher wrote:
| no semilog/log plots, heatmaps, contour maps, violin charts, eye
| diagrams. No love for the engineers i guess
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26536342 - March 2021 (1
| comment)
|
| _A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3120011 - Oct 2011 (1
| comment)
|
| _A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1601068 - Aug 2010 (1
| comment)
|
| _A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1420355 - June 2010 (1
| comment)
|
| _A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1284403 - April 2010 (1
| comment)
|
| _A periodic table of visualization methods_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=668496 - June 2009 (2
| comments)
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