Tim Churches wrote: > Courtesy of the Infosthetics blog, a very nice facetted browser using > "elastic lists", in which metadata about the frequency of each category > in a facet is conveyed by the size and shading of the item's background. > Also, be sure to enable the sparklines to see a temporal dimension as > well. All done in Flash, not Javascript, but there are some nice ideas > there: http://well-formed-data.net/experiments/elastic_lists/
Thinking more about this, the idea of making the area of the bar for each category in a facet proportional to its conditional univariate frequency, as illustrated in the "elastic lists" demo above, is pretty cute. But I wonder if that idea can be extended to multivariate frequencies, with shading based on the degree of variation from expectation, as in mosaic displays (see http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Papers/asa92.html for a good introduction) - could that ever be a useful alternative interface for a facetted data browser? Sparklines are also a very neat idea, and might be a useful addition to, say, the thumbnails view in Exhibit, for time series of quantities (although the x-axis of a sparkline does not have to be time) - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkline and particularly http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001OR&topic_id=1 Tim C _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general
