Static Text-Based Data Visualizations: An Overview and a Sampler

Abstract

Data visualizations have enhanced human understandings of various types of quantitative data for many years. Of late, text-based data visualizations have been used informally and formally on the WWW and Internet as well as for research. This chapter describes this phenomenon of text-based data visualizations by describing how many of the most common ones are created, where the underlying textual datasets are extracted from, how text-based data visualizations are analyzed, and the limits of such graphical depictions. While this work does not provide a comprehensive view of static (non-dynamic) text-based data visualizations, many of the most common ones are introduced. These visualizations are created using a variety of common commercial and open-source tools including Microsoft Excel, Google Books Ngram Viewer, Microsoft Visio, NVivo 10, Maltego Tungsten, CASOS AutoMap and ORA NetScenes, FreeMind, Wordle, UCINET and NetDraw, and Tableau Public. It is assumed that readers have a basic knowledge of machine-based text analysis.