ZuantuSet: A Collection of Historical Chinese Visualizations and Illustrations

TL;DR

This paper introduces ZuantuSet, a large dataset of over 71,000 Chinese historical visualizations, enabling new research into Chinese cultural visualization practices and design patterns.

Contribution

It presents a semi-automatic pipeline for collecting and labeling Chinese historical visualizations and provides the first extensive dataset focused on this cultural context.

Findings

Identification of unique Chinese visualization design patterns

Analysis of cultural influences on visualization styles

Potential applications in cultural and historical research

Abstract

Historical visualizations are a valuable resource for studying the history of visualization and inspecting the cultural context where they were created. When investigating historical visualizations, it is essential to consider contributions from different cultural frameworks to gain a comprehensive understanding. While there is extensive research on historical visualizations within the European cultural framework, this work shifts the focus to ancient China, a cultural context that remains underexplored by visualization researchers. To this aim, we propose a semi-automatic pipeline to collect, extract, and label historical Chinese visualizations. Through the pipeline, we curate ZuantuSet, a dataset with over 71K visualizations and 108K illustrations. We analyze distinctive design patterns of historical Chinese visualizations and their potential causes within the context of Chinese history and culture. We illustrate potential usage scenarios for this dataset, summarize the unique challenges and solutions associated with collecting historical Chinese visualizations, and outline future research directions.