Unfamiliar or esoteric visual forms arise in many areas of visualization. While such forms can be intriguing, it can be unclear how to make effective use of them without long periods of practice or costly user studies. In this work we analyze the table cartogram—a graphic which visualizes tabular data by bringing the areas of a grid of quadrilaterals into correspondence with the input data, like a heat map that has been “area-ed” rather than colored. Despite having existed for several years, little is known about its appropriate usage. We mend this gap by using Algebraic Visualization Design to show that they are best suited to relatively small tables with ordinal axes for some comparison and outlier identification tasks. In doing so we demonstrate a discount theory-based analysis that can be used to cheaply determine best practices for unknown visualizations.

中文翻译：

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表格制图有什么用？代数分析

不熟悉或深奥的视觉形式出现在许多可视化领域。虽然这些形式可能很有趣，但如果没有长时间的实践或昂贵的用户研究，可能不清楚如何有效地使用它们。在这项工作中，我们分析了表格制图——一种通过将四边形网格的面积与输入数据对应起来来可视化表格数据的图形，就像经过“面积化”的热图而不是有色。尽管已经存在了好几年，但对其适当使用知之甚少。我们通过使用代数可视化设计来弥补这一差距，以表明它们最适合用于一些比较和异常值识别任务的具有序数轴的相对较小的表。在这样做时，我们展示了一种基于折扣理论的分析，可用于廉价地确定未知可视化的最佳实践。