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A Treemap Chart Pie

Robert Kosara / October 20, 2016

A Treemap Chart Pie

After his recent early chart pie attempts, Ben Shneiderman has now achieved the ultimate in chart pie baking: a treemap chart pie. 

In case you’re wondering about the significance of this momentous achievement: treemaps were Ben’s idea.

Just as before, I’ll just let Ben explain this one. I can’t top his puns, anyway.

HI Robert,
I finally got around to making my next pie… and this one is a treemap pie! Made with apples and pears.

Which makes it a pear-ified tree-mapple pie! (Groan!)

I’m not sure this is up to the level of quality for your blog, but maybe you’ll find some clever way elevate the discourse…. maybe with a crusty pun, a slicing jibe, or an overbaked quip.

I wish I could offer you a slice… Ben

treepie1

There’s actually quite a bit of pie-engineering that goes into this sort of pie to keep it from drying out.  Since the pie is round and a treemap square (or at least rectangular), I had suggested he try a Voronoi treemap – maybe a project for the future?

Ben’s chart pies have pushed me to finally buy Eugenia Cheng’s How to Bake π (see the glowing review here). It’s a bit too late for VIS this year, but perhaps somebody wants to organize a visualization bake-off next year?

Filed Under: Blog 2016

Robert Kosara is Data Visualization Developer at Observable. Before that, he was Research Scientist at Tableau Software (2012–2022) and Associate Professor of Computer Science (2005–2012). His research focus is the communication of data using visualization. In addition to blogging, Robert also runs and tweets. Read More…

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Monika M. Wahi, MPH, CPH says

    October 20, 2016 at 7:42 am

    Hi there,

    Love the pie posts! What data were visualized in this tree map on the pie? Was it the proportion of pears and apples in the pie? Or something else?

    -Monika

    Reply
    • benbendc says

      October 20, 2016 at 11:40 am

      I started by trying to show different fruit sales in the US, http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/fruit-tree-nuts/trade.aspx but this got too complicated, so I did a simplified but not realistic treemap that was visually appealing to me & easy enough to make in a pie (e.g. many small rectangles were not easy).
      I used 2/3 apple and 1/3 pear.

      Reply
  2. Glenna says

    October 20, 2016 at 7:44 am

    Vitruvian Data Viz

    Reply

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