VisTaxa: Developing a Taxonomy of Historical Visualizations

2025-05-03

AI Summary

Existing visualization taxonomies focus predominantly on contemporary digital visualizations, neglecting pre-digital historical visualizations—resulting in a lack of systematic understanding of the historical dimension of the visualization design space. Method: We introduce VisTaxa, the first empirically grounded taxonomy for historical visualization images, featuring a novel historical visualization encoding protocol and an annotation comparison framework. Based on 400 historical images from the 16th–19th centuries, we employed manual coding, qualitative analysis, and cross-temporal systematic comparison to construct a structurally coherent and extensible classification system. Contribution/Results: VisTaxa fills a critical gap in visualization design space research by rigorously incorporating historical perspectives. It provides foundational infrastructure and methodological tools for analyzing visualization inheritance mechanisms, modeling diachronic evolution, and supporting history-informed design education.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Data Visualization & Summarization
• Computer Vision: Visual Reasoning & Symbolic Representations
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Geometric, Spatial, and Temporal Reasoning

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data visualization
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Querying, indexing, and retrieval in Web-related graphs
• Semantics and Knowledge: Scalable techniques for the creation, curation, publication, maintenance, and consumption of large, Web-based, structured, reusable, knowledge graphs and ontologies

Abstract

Historical visualizations are a rich resource for visualization research. While taxonomy is commonly used to structure and understand the design space of visualizations, existing taxonomies primarily focus on contemporary visualizations and largely overlook historical visualizations. To address this gap, we describe an empirical method for taxonomy development. We introduce a coding protocol and the VisTaxa system for taxonomy labeling and comparison. We demonstrate using our method to develop a historical visualization taxonomy by coding 400 images of historical visualizations. We analyze the coding result and reflect on the coding process. Our work is an initial step toward a systematic investigation of the design space of historical visualizations.

Problem

• Developing a taxonomy for historical visualizations
• Addressing the gap in existing contemporary-focused taxonomies
• Empirical method for labeling and comparing historical visualizations

Innovation

• Empirical method for taxonomy development
• Coding protocol for taxonomy labeling
• VisTaxa system for comparison