Aesthetics and Ordering in Stacked Area Charts
Authored by Steffen Strunge Mathiesen and Hans-Jörg Schulz
Stacked area chart of Facebook Messenger data showing message counts for 604 contacts over time. Between a random ordering (left) and the order generated by the state-of-the-art approach (center), one can see how ordering the layers improves the looks of the chart. Between the state-of-the-art approach and ours (right), one can also see how our aesthetic criteria and ordering algorithm improve over the state-of-the-art ordering, with the jumps almost completely gone (e.g., after the first peak).
Interactive Demonstration
Flatness vs. Straightness
Flatness vs. Continuity
Use the interface above to show different combinations of aesthetic criteria for laying out stacked area charts.
Resources
Below, you find links to primary resources for our paper, including the Github repository.
Supplemental Materials
Here, we list supplemental resources accompanying the paper.
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Datasets used in the Paper Available in comma-separated format
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Algorithm Details Document describing the UpwardsOpt algorithm in more detail.
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Running UpwardsOpt Demo video showing our approach run on text message data.
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Running BestFirst+TwoOpt Demo video showing two alternative algorithms run on text message data.
About this Project
We kindly ask you to use the following citation when including UpwardsOpt as part of your work:
@inproceedings{mathiesen_stacked_2021,
series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
title = {Aesthetics and Ordering in Stacked Area Charts},
volume = {12909},
isbn = {978-3-030-86061-5},
doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-86062-2_1},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Theory and Application of Diagrams (Diagrams'21)},
publisher = {Springer},
author = {Mathiesen, Steffen Strunge and Schulz, Hans-J\"{o}rg},
editor = {Basu, Amrita and Stapleton, Gem and Linker, Sven and Legg, Catherine
and Manalo, Emmanuel and Viana, Petrucio},
year = {2021},
pages = {3-19}
}