IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph. 2018 Dec;24(12):3032-3043. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2017.2785807. Epub 2017 Dec 21.
Unit visualizations are a family of visualizations where every data item is represented by a unique visual mark-a visual unit-during visual encoding. For certain datasets and tasks, unit visualizations can provide more information, better match the user's mental model, and enable novel interactions compared to traditional aggregated visualizations. Current visualization grammars cannot fully describe the unit visualization family. In this paper, we characterize the design space of unit visualizations to derive a grammar that can express them. The resulting grammar is called ATOM, and is based on passing data through a series of layout operations that divide the output of previous operations recursively until the size and position of every data point can be determined. We evaluate the expressive power of the grammar by both using it to describe existing unit visualizations, as well as to suggest new unit visualizations.
单位可视化是一类可视化方法，其中每个数据项在可视化编码过程中都由一个独特的视觉标记（一个视觉单位）表示。对于某些数据集和任务，与传统的聚合可视化相比，单位可视化可以提供更多的信息，更好地匹配用户的心理模型，并实现新的交互方式。当前的可视化语法无法完全描述单位可视化家族。在本文中，我们对单位可视化的设计空间进行了特征化描述，以推导出可以表达它们的语法。得到的语法称为 ATOM，它基于将数据通过一系列布局操作传递，这些操作递归地划分前一个操作的输出，直到可以确定每个数据点的大小和位置。我们通过使用它来描述现有的单位可视化以及提出新的单位可视化来评估语法的表达能力。
