Keywords: Unit Visualizations, Data Storytelling, Data Exploration, Visualization and Animation
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. They can be particularly useful when relaying a series of related visualizations to illustrate insights in data. In this talk, we will describe how we use the principals of the grammar of graphics in constructing tools for interactive exploration and presentation of data using unit visualizations.