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Comment by __mharrison__ | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I'm currently writing a book I on visualization. It's pretty opinionated. My thesis after teaching viz to companies for a while is that most plots should be limited to one of 4: line, bar, scatter, and histogram.

I think I'm going to try this dataset with my thesis.

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Is histogram not a bar chart? As in, it's a transformation you do on the data (to get the frequency per bin) and then most commonly represent it as a bar chart. It seems to me like saying that line smoothing is a different graph type: it's a new look, but if it was previously a line chart, it's still a line chart except that the lines are drawn between different values. How do you see that?

I would also say there are more useful visualizations one can do than bar, line, and scatter. For example, though I'm not sure what it's called, there are charts that suit different orders of magnitude. They're like area charts (line chart with the area under the line filled in) but it wraps around from the bottom, when it would otherwise exceed the top, and shows that second layer in a different color. Think I mainly see them for like network traffic or latency graphs. I find them useful because you can see different scales without a lot of vertical space. (Don't know how well they work for color blind people, but then the same argument goes for any sight impairment and visualizations.) The underlying data points remain the same so I'd say it's actually a visualization change and not a change of the values being shown

Of course, most of the things people pick as more-pretty-looking alternatives to bar/line/scatter aren't good visualizations, so I agree with the sentiment. Just that there do seem to be more options that have benefits for certain datasets

Histogram uses bars but it illustrates frequency in buckets whereas by bars OP likely means more categorical in terms of what the bar represents.

Yes, it is a specialized version of a bar chart. But typically the goal is to look at the distribution of the data. I will also explore using specialized scatter plots (with line plots) to explore the distribution of the data.

I pretty much always use ECDF in preference to histogram these days.

It’s like saying a 100% bar chart is also a different chart type.

There's a ton of visualizations. Most folks don't know how to tell basic stories using just these plots. If you look at professional visualizations from media outlets you don't see many "fancy" plots, you see well crafted versions of these 4 plots (and maps) 80% of the time.

Applying the Pareto principle, you will get the most bang for your buck if you master story telling with these. (And you won't need to touch the other types of plots).

In my opinion violin plots are severely underused, they are basically box plots on steroids.

A random example: https://stackabuse.s3.amazonaws.com/media/seaborn-violin-plo...

I prefer a histogram or jittered scatter plot.

Beeswarm plots are more intuitively interpretable, in my experience

Hard same. So much effort has been wasted on fancy charts that are hard to make and often indecipherable.

Question about your book. I'm looking for an Encyclopedia of Visualizations. Something very complete.

For each visualization I would want, at a minimum, an Example and the Name (and any alternative names).

Is your book something like this? Or do you know of a book or website that offers something like this?

I've been active in data visualization for the past decade or so and the closest I've found to what you describe is Visualize This.

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