Revitalizing the scatter plot

Abstract

An effective tool for discovering the underlying meaning of tabular data is computer-assisted interactive visualization. The types of visualization which are most appropriate to depict certain types of tabular data typically depend on the type of data. Scatter plots are traditionally most appropriate for numeric real-valued data of low-dimensionality. The capabilities of the more traditionally mundane kinds of pictures such as scatter plots may be expanded to usefully depict categorical tabular data by incorporating annotations and transforms, and by integrating the extension into an interactive system.