7 ms·

A periodic table of visualization methods (2007)

295 points by Daub 3y ago

awestroke 3y ago
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 3y ago
  The 'noble' ones aren't always garbage - they have their place, but are mostly replaced by 'user stories' and 'rich picture' concepts.
Daub 3y ago
Its a bit old now, but full of fascinating material.
alanbernstein 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  It's possible that the correct visualization, the nutritional food pyramid, became too unwieldy with this many visualization methods.
- hyperthesis 3y ago
  The period table is less a visualization method than an accurate model.
- bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  >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 3y ago
    I wonder if a "tree" would be a better visualization methods for visualization methods
    - kevindamm 3y ago
      Even a Venn diagram would be better than a periodic table.
RagnarD 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  If you didn't already know of archiving websites, you're one of today's lucky ten thousand! See https://archive.org https://archive.org :)
dw-im-here 3y ago
This is the polonium of visualization
- badcppdev 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    It made my hair fall out
throwaway2562 3y ago
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.
mapreduce 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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/ https://browser.timeviz.net/ It also seems to be maintained by people working in that area.
- fjkdlsjflkds 3y ago
  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 3y ago
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.
yashthakker 3y ago
[dead]
graphviz 3y ago
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/ 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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
Great set of visualisations ! This will be my goto quick lookup next time I am thinking how to visualise data
bane 3y ago
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 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1712936.1712954
- dahart 3y ago
  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/ 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 3y ago
    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_the_User_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Shneiderman#Designing_the_...
dr_kiszonka 3y ago
A nice zoo of time series visualizations is here (and a link to a free Springer e-book): https://browser.timeviz.net/ https://browser.timeviz.net/
mjvmroz 3y ago
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 3y ago
no semilog/log plots, heatmaps, contour maps, violin charts, eye diagrams. No love for the engineers i guess
dang 3y ago
Related: A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26536342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26536342 - March 2021 (1 comment) A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3120011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3120011 - Oct 2011 (1 comment) A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1601068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1601068 - Aug 2010 (1 comment) A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1420355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1420355 - June 2010 (1 comment) A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1284403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1284403 - April 2010 (1 comment) A periodic table of visualization methods - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=668496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=668496 - June 2009 (2 comments)

295 points by Daub 3y ago

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 3y ago
The 'noble' ones aren't always garbage - they have their place, but are mostly replaced by 'user stories' and 'rich picture' concepts.

Daub 3y ago

Its a bit old now, but full of fascinating material.

alanbernstein 3y ago

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 3y ago

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 3y ago
It's possible that the correct visualization, the nutritional food pyramid, became too unwieldy with this many visualization methods.
hyperthesis 3y ago
The period table is less a visualization method than an accurate model.
bryanrasmussen 3y ago
>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 3y ago
  I wonder if a "tree" would be a better visualization methods for visualization methods
  - kevindamm 3y ago
    Even a Venn diagram would be better than a periodic table.

RagnarD 3y ago

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 3y ago

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 3y ago

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 3y ago
If you didn't already know of archiving websites, you're one of today's lucky ten thousand! See https://archive.org https://archive.org :)

dw-im-here 3y ago

This is the polonium of visualization

badcppdev 3y ago
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 3y ago
  It made my hair fall out

throwaway2562 3y ago

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.

mapreduce 3y ago

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 3y ago
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/ https://browser.timeviz.net/ It also seems to be maintained by people working in that area.
fjkdlsjflkds 3y ago
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 3y ago

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.

yashthakker 3y ago

[dead]

graphviz 3y ago

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/ 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 3y ago

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 3y ago

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 3y ago

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 3y ago

Great set of visualisations ! This will be my goto quick lookup next time I am thinking how to visualise data

bane 3y ago

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 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1712936.1712954

dahart 3y ago
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/ 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 3y ago
  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_the_User_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Shneiderman#Designing_the_...

dr_kiszonka 3y ago

A nice zoo of time series visualizations is here (and a link to a free Springer e-book): https://browser.timeviz.net/ https://browser.timeviz.net/

mjvmroz 3y ago

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 3y ago

no semilog/log plots, heatmaps, contour maps, violin charts, eye diagrams. No love for the engineers i guess

dang 3y ago

Related: A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26536342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26536342 - March 2021 (1 comment) A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3120011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3120011 - Oct 2011 (1 comment) A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1601068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1601068 - Aug 2010 (1 comment) A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1420355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1420355 - June 2010 (1 comment) A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1284403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1284403 - April 2010 (1 comment) A periodic table of visualization methods - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=668496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=668496 - June 2009 (2 comments)