VisTaxa: Developing a Taxonomy of Historical Visualizations

TL;DR

This paper introduces VisTaxa, an empirical method and system for developing a taxonomy of historical visualizations, addressing the lack of structured understanding in this area.

Contribution

It presents a novel empirical approach, including a coding protocol and system, to systematically classify and analyze historical visualizations.

Findings

Developed a taxonomy from 400 historical visualization images

Analyzed the design space of historical visualizations

Reflected on the coding process and methodology

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.