21–30 of 49 posts
This is something i'd prefer to save forever. Who knows if i need it in 5-25 years and the website is not there anymore.
See https://archive.org :)
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.…
>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 t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 t…
I wonder if a "tree" would be a better visualization methods for visualization methods
There has been excellent work on taxonomies for data visualization. Tamara Munzner's book "Visualization Analysis and Design" is a good starting point.
There has been excellent work on identifying "dimensions" or properties of data visualization. Lee Wilkinson's "Grammar of Graphics" is a landmark. You could search backward to find Bertin's Semiology of Graphics, or forward to find ongoing work like UW's Vega https://idl.cs.washington.edu/papers/vega-lite/
Some of this work might somewhat capture the properties of a periodic table to organize a catalog and even support further discovery.
1) It's not clear for me how color segmentation groups were picked in the first place. Are they mutually exclusive?
2) Would be great to make this interactive. There is a substantial cognitive effort to imagine these methods from the name of few words (good exercise but come on).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 t…
I wonder if a "tree" would be a better visualization methods for visualization methods
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.
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.…
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.
This is a great example of how not to organize and display information.
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.…
There is The Azure Periodic Table: https://www.azureperiodictable.com/