{"id":236,"date":"2009-04-09T21:36:55","date_gmt":"2009-04-10T04:36:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=236"},"modified":"2009-04-09T21:41:20","modified_gmt":"2009-04-10T04:41:20","slug":"sparklines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=236","title":{"rendered":"Sparklines"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.edwardtufte.com\/bboard\/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001OR&#038;topic_id=1\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=floatRight src=\"http:\/\/blog.ted.com\/images\/sparkline.gif\"><\/a>I am a latecomer, it seems, to some of Edward Tufte&#8217;s brilliant ideas.  Today I stumbled across the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Sparkline\">sparkline<\/a>, a &#8220;small, intense, simple dataword&#8221; (Tufte) that is best illustrated by example.  Sparklines permit you to display a large volume of numeric information in a very tiny space, while conveying the information perhaps even more effectively than if you&#8217;d used a large floating figure or a table.  Tufte posted a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.edwardtufte.com\/bboard\/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001OR&#038;topic_id=1\">sparkline introduction<\/a>, which is an excerpt from his book <a href=\"http:\/\/www.edwardtufte.com\/tufte\/books_be\">Beautiful Evidence<\/a>.  Many others have followed up with their own sparkline creations, sparkline generators (in perl, HTML, Excel, and even special font encodings), and sparkline critiques.<\/p>\n<p>One tip I particularly liked had to do with aspect ratio; Tufte suggests (after William S. Cleveland, 1993) adjusting the vertical scale so that slopes are about 45 degrees (rather than very flat or very spiky).  While this is simply a rule of thumb, to be violated if the situation calls for it, I did find his examples to be compelling; &#8220;lumpy&#8221; data does seem to be easier to visually process than &#8220;spiky&#8221; data.<\/p>\n<p>But what really took my breath away was this particular example:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.edwardtufte.com\/bboard\/images\/00027o-2540.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>This is cited by Tufte as appearing in Robert Sedgewick&#8217;s 1998 &#8220;Algorithms in C&#8221;.  It illustrates several passes of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Merge_sort\">mergesort<\/a> being applied to a 200-item list.  It is absolutely brilliant!  Whoever thought of visualizing the values (sort keys) as the angle of the lines was absolutely inspired.  This graphic stole my attention as only a true work of art can.  I&#8217;m still staring at it in fascination.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll have to be on the lookout for places where sparklines could be the right solution in my next technical paper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I am a latecomer, it seems, to some of Edward Tufte&#8217;s brilliant ideas. Today I stumbled across the sparkline, a &#8220;small, intense, simple dataword&#8221; (Tufte) that is best illustrated by example. Sparklines permit you to display a large volume of numeric information in a very tiny space, while conveying the information perhaps even more effectively [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[43,27],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=236"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":245,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236\/revisions\/245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}