The chart above shows the number of inhabitants of 4 countries living in the country’s capital. How would you call this chart type? I’m asking because this chart type has a lot of names:
- many, including Lisa Rost, the
The chart above shows the number of inhabitants of 4 countries living in the country’s capital. How would you call this chart type? I’m asking because this chart type has a lot of names:
- many, including Lisa Rost, the author of the chart above, call it a marimekko chart
- sometimes marimekko is shortened to mekko
- an older name for these charts is mosaic plot
- the Financial Times calls them proportional stacked bars in their great Visual Vocabulary
That’s a lot of names for a chart that is not even a xenographic (although if you add one dimension, you get the 3-dimensional mosaic plot). But marimekko-mekko-mosaic-proportional stacked bars are not the only chart type suffering from multiple names. It is actually not uncommon for charts to have multiple names:
- connected scatterplots are sometimes called (or should be called) snail trail plots
- joy plots are also ridge plots
- a radar chart is also a web chart, spider chart, star chart, star plot, cobweb chart, irregular polygon, polar chart, or Kiviat diagram
- Nightingale rose is also called a Coxcomb
- a barcode plot is also a strip plot and a rug plot
- waffle charts are also grid charts or unit charts
thats a unit chart
— EJ Fox (@mrejfox) February 14, 2018
- choropleth maps are sometimes called chloropleth maps (but that’s a different story)
The list goes on: check my Twitter-sourced list or hover over the chart names in the Chartmaker Directory
“Big deal,” I hear you say, “some charts have more than one name.” But I do think this is a problem. Imagine you want to make a marimekko chart, but you don’t know how to do it. So you google “marimekko tutorial” and if you are an Excel or Tableau user, you will probably find what you are looking for. But if you want to make one in R or JMP? Than you need to know it is called a mosaic plot in those tools.
This is such an important and as such simple concept in charting made needlessly slippery due to the profusion of names. Googling “How to trellis plots in nn”…
— Jonatan Hildén (@jhilden) April 26, 20