VisTaxa: Developing a Taxonomy of Historical Visualizations

Yu Zhang, Xinyue Chen, Weili Zheng, Yuhan Guo, Guozheng Li, Siming Chen*, Xiaoru Yuan

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Historical visualizations are a rich resource for visualization research. While taxonomy is commonly used to structure and understand the design space of visualizations, existing taxonomies primarily focus on contemporary visualizations and largely overlook historical visualizations. To address this gap, we describe an empirical method for taxonomy development. We introduce a coding protocol and the VisTaxa system for taxonomy labeling and comparison. We demonstrate using our method to develop a historical visualization taxonomy by coding 400 images of historical visualizations. We analyze the coding result and reflect on the coding process. Our work is an initial step toward a systematic investigation of the design space of historical visualizations.

Original languageEnglish
JournalIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
DOIs
Publication statusAccepted/In press - 2025

Keywords

  • data labeling
  • digital humanities
  • Historical visualization
  • qualitative coding
  • taxonomy

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