Grammar¶
What is grammar?¶
- In a linguistic sense, grammar + science
- More generally, principles or set or principles of something
Why grammar?¶
- Grammar expands the scope of meaning that its pieces can convey
- Helps us think/shapes the way that we think
- Helps us communicate/how we communicate
A history of visualization grammar¶
- 1967: Semiology of Graphics
- Jacques Bertin
- How to organize thinking about graphics
- The values we use to encode data (position, size, shape, value, color, orientation, texture)
- Purpose of graphics (Record, communicate, process)
- 1999: Grammar of Graphics
- If graphics are charts, we don't have:
- reuse
- easily adding new charts
- Stages of graphics creation
- 2001: Polaris
- Using a grammar of graphics to define the graphics
- Grammar allows specifications
- Undo/redo
- 2006: ggplot
- Visualizations from within R
- There are a lot of defaults
- Things inside the aes() call map to data points
- 2009: d3.js
- Interactivity
- Customizability
- Use a grammar of graphics implemented in javascript
- Mapping data to svg
- Purpose: wanting to present the data well to a large audience
- Telling a story
- Illustrating algorithms
- Building dashboards
- 2013: Vega
- Portable grammar + composable interactions
- Saves specifications to a json document
- Polestar
- Rendering is donw in d3.js
- Vincent is a vega wrapper
Final thoughts¶
- The more expressive you want to be, the more verbose your syntax will be.
- In the future, 3D & VR
- Network graphics
- Cross language
- Domain specific grammars
- Charles
- Qlik-sense/view HIPPA compliant
- Goes into major EHR systems, like Epic
- similar to Tableau (but Tableau's cloud isn't HIPPA compliant)
- Has an R API
- Has a graphics API
- Luke
- Tools are not meant for
- Zooming in and out of a large graphic
- The value of a bigger picture/takeaway in data presentation/pitches
- It's easier to keep track of the superstructure of the information