“The earliest seeds of visualization arose in geometric diagrams, in tables of the positions of stars and other celestial bodies, and in the making of maps to aid in navigation and exploration.”

“The idea of coordinates was used by ancient Egyptian surveyors in laying out towns, earthly and heavenly positions were located by something akin to latitude and longitude by at least 200 B.C.,

Friendly, M. (2008). A Brief History of Data Visualization. In C. Chen, W. Härdle, & A. Unwin, Handbook of Data Visualization (pp. 15–56). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-33037-0_2

“Creating a visualization requires a number of nuanced judgments.”

“One must determine which questions to ask, identify the appropriate data, and select effective visual encodings to map data values to graphical features such as position, size, shape, and color.”

“The challenge is that for any given data set the number of visual encodings—and thus the space of possible visualization designs—is extremely large.”

Problems?

1D “Jittered” Scatterplot

Using transparency (“alpha”)

Using empty symbols such as rings