Abstract
Time is often one of the more important variables to be displayed in a chart, and it can be placed as a positional dimension, giving it a high visual impact and affording the user the strongest ability to make comparisons. However, in other situations time is not the focus of a visualization – the goal is to show some other features of the data instead. In such a situation time may be of secondary importance; we do not want to make large changes to the chart to display time, but we do want to show it as an additional feature that may help viewers understand the data better. In such a case, we can portray time using an aesthetic, a visual property of a graphical element that represents a variable. In this chapter the focus of the discussion is on enhancing a visualization that is nontemporal in nature by adding an aesthetic that shows time.
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Notes
- 1.
One of Tufte’s [111] criteria for evaluating charts is the data–ink ratio – the proportion of ink corresponding to the data as opposed to other elements. This is a different criterion. What is urged here is that if a measure of size is being represented using an aesthetic, then there should be a correlation between how noticeable the element is and the value of the size variable. Bigger, more contrasting elements are more noticeable, and so we say they have more visual weight than smaller, less contrasting elements.
- 2.
It is generally a good idea to avoid 3-D anyway. Since we are not good at judging position in 3-D, and our perception of 3-D is highly conflated with how we perceive aesthetics such as size, brightness, and saturation, it is best only to use it for very simple encodings, or just for decoration.
- 3.
The process of designing a visualization often involves compromises such as these. The guidelines of Chap. 3 give suggestions on how to decide what is important and how to prioritize, but in the end judgement calls must be made.
- 4.
Henry V had campaigns in 1415, 1417, and 1421 in France, but the records give Gloucester as the commander in 1417 and do not record the commanders in 1421. These campaigns were all under Henry as king, but only the 1415 expedition records him as being the commander.
- 5.
Another reason for the increased number of archers might be that archers were paid considerably less than melee combatants, due to their lower risk of death. As any good manpower study would have told Henry, if you can get the same amount of effective work from cheaper workers, it makes sense to use them as much as possible.
- 6.
We could also, more simply, use the font size to show the frequencies, but this would mean that long words like holluschickie would gain far more visual prominence than short words such as hide, whereas for these data their frequencies are almost identical, and so they should appear visually similar. This turns out to be a tricky perceptual issue; our perception of the sizes of words is not easy to quantify.
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Wills, G. (2010). Aesthetics. In: Visualizing Time. Statistics and Computing. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-77907-2_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-77907-2_7
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