Two views I didn't have time to write before releasing Exhibit are:
1. Histograms, which you mentioned. We can just use a few divs to draw bars.
2. Pivot tables, like in Excel. We can let authors and users pick the
variables for the rows and the columns, and an aggregate formula for the
cells. Now that Exhibit's Expression language supports some functions
like count, add, and multiple, pivot tables wouldn't be too hard to
implement.
While Exhibit is targeting authors of web pages, there is a clear
opportunity to empower users by letting them manipulate the data right
inside the web pages, not having to copy the data off to spreadsheets.
I'm planning to fix the tabular view so that it will let users add new
columns on-the-fly. In the same way, histograms and pivot tables can let
users reconfigure them.
Wouldn't it be nice to go to a web page such as this one
http://www.opensecrets.org/states/instvsout.asp?State=MA&Year=2006
and turn those tables into plots right in place?
David
David Karger wrote:
> I've seen some discussion going by regarding potential extensions to the
> exhibit syntax, but another direction in which it would be quite useful
> to push is in extending the set of available views. There have been
> quite a few interesting visualizations bound to a specific blob of data;
> they'll be more useful if you can feed them from exhibits. What those
> views tend to do is use a few properties of a data set to guide their
> construction; with an exhibit you could plug arbitrary properties. A
> few examples come to mind:
>
> * a "tag cloud" view. a tag cloud is driven by two properties; one
> defines the order of the tags and the other the size of each tag. in
> delicious alphabetical order and tag popularity are used but one could
> equally well birthday to sort and net worth to size a set of people.
>
> * a graph-layout view where the items are connected by a line if they
> are related by a given property. More generally one could allow
> multiple properties and use a different color or shape of line for
> each. Or perhaps some animation and focus as in this tool:
> http://der-mo.net/05_links/index.html
>
> * a pie chart view using any number-valued property to size the wedges,
> or a histogram view to show number of items with each value of a given
> property, or some other favorite type of chart.
>
> * a scatter plot that places items in a grid according to the number
> values of two distrinct properties.
>
>
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