Skip to content

ahupp/etframes

Folders and files

NameName
Last commit message
Last commit date

Latest commit

 

History

3 Commits
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Repository files navigation

etframes: Applying the ideas of Edward Tufte to matplotlib

Edward Tufte is a professor and author known for his excellent (and beautiful!) books on the visual display of statistical information. Last year I had the opportunity to attend one of his courses and was inspired to apply his ideas to my favorite plotting library, matplotlib.

The result is etfames, a python module that operates on matplotlib plots. So far I've implemented two graph types described in the The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (VDQI): the dash-dot-plot and range frames.

Dash Dot Plot

A dash-dot-plot places a tick mark on the axis for each value in a scatter plot. When there are many values in the graph this can be a more effective way to understand their distribution than looking at the raw data. For example see

Example of a dash dot plot

See demo_ddp.py for a working example.

Range Frames

The range frame re-uses the frame (edge) of a graph to display useful information. Instead of drawing a full frame around the graph the frame is only drawn from the minimum to the maximum value along that axis. For example:

Example of a range frame

See demo_range.py for a working example.

Other Work

There are several other graph types described in VDQI that would be nice to implement, particularly the extension of range frames that turns them into a box plot.

A related project is sparkplot which uses the matplotlib library to create sparklines.

About

Edward Tufte's ideas, applied to matplotlib

Resources

Stars

Watchers

Forks

Releases

No releases published

Packages

No packages published

Languages