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objects as glyphs is suspect. (e.g. Wyoming and Colorado are both
rectangular, Tufte's mouse and rat are very similar).
Fig. 3.8.
Left: Chernoff faces [Che73]. Note mouth shape and openness in a
Chernoff face plot from Mathematica [Wei]. Right: Glyphs as states (similar to
[Woo09]) and animals [Tuf96].
Star, sticks, and radar plots
: Star coordinates [Kan01] use angle (and
length) to convey multiple attributes in a single glyph. Radar plots offer an
interesting opportunity for emergent shapes, although the shapes are based
on straight lines where each angle is an artefact of a sequence of data
values; and it is possible to have identical emergent shapes that represent
different data values (Fig. 3.9).
Fig. 3.9.
Left: Star Coordinates use angle and length to create a glyph (redrawn
based on [Kan01]). Right: a radar plot of 4 data series: on the left, all 4 series are
plotted on the same grid. On the right, each series is plotted side by side resulting
in various shapes. Note that the lower right two shapes (C and D) are the same
shape but different data values.
Taxonomy-based Glyph Generation:
a systematic process for creating
glyph designs based on concept categorization and ranked visual
attributes. Using this approach, attributes of shape may be used for
different data attributes within a single glyph (Fig. 3.10).
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