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Comment by albert_e | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

> 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?

> 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.

>PERIODIC TABLES OF ALMOST EVERYTHING EXCEPT ELEMENTS

https://www.pinterest.com/brianhousand/periodic-tables-of-al...

Absolutely brilliant. Thanks.

>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.

I wonder if a "tree" would be a better visualization methods for visualization methods

Even a Venn diagram would be better than a periodic table.

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.

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)

The period table is less a visualization method than an accurate model.

> 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/

The key here is they didn't try to match the elements table's shape.

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.

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.

It's possible that the correct visualization, the nutritional food pyramid, became too unwieldy with this many visualization methods.

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.

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.

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