A Building-Block Approach to the Diversity of Visualization Types – Each Type Expressed Visually, and as a Systematically Generated Sentence

A building-block approach is presented that shows commonalities and differences within a large corpus of different types of visualization. Refining and testing our earlier work, we have analyzed more than one hundred different types of visualization in terms of 19 fundamental visual encoding techniques, and 13 types of questions that visualizations can answer with those encoding techniques. We characterize each type of visualization accordingly, with a natural language sentence, generated in a systematic way. We also provide guidance on how to choose (combinations of) visual encoding techniques, depending on the questions to be answered by a visualization. A few examples of visual encoding techniques are grouping by boundary, unit-based tallying (as in Isotype charts), proportional space-filling, extending along a coordinate axis, and coupling by adjacency. Various other building-block approaches to visualization are reviewed.