June 07, 2006
Sparklines
Sparklines make their first appearance in Baseball Musings posts today. These are tiny graphs that fit in the space of a word. My great thanks to Joe Georigo who wrote the code and currently is providing the sparklines. Feel free to leave Joe a tip for his efforts.
Notice in this post how you can see Joe Mauer's recent hot streak pushed him by Alex Rios for the batting average lead. The lowest ticks are zeros; I'd like to change that so a zero appears as a flat line instead of a vertical bar. The ticks in red are multi-hit games. The higher the tick, the more hits in the game.
Jason Schmidt's strikeouts are displayed here. This time, 10 K games are in red.
I'd love to hear your opinions of these graphs, and what you might like to see represented in sparklines.
Posted by David Pinto at
09:01 AM
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WOOHOO!!! SPARKLINES!!! Sparklines are fanTAStic! Thanks for adding them to your site. I've been a fan of Tufte for years and this is one of his many ways of displaying a lot of information in a very small, efficient manner. Long live Tufte!
Sorry, not a fan. At all.
me neither. I don't mean to insult anyone. I'm sure it was hard work and it's a cool concept but I don't think it adds anything. I'd rather you include a link to a real graph.
Sparklines are cool but I would make a few suggestions:
1. When you present sparklines, define them. I don't understand the ones you've used -- what does up mean, what does down mean, etc.?
2. Use them when they help. I'm not sure the ones you've used any insight (but maybe I would if I understood their structure). It's impossible to compare Rios and Mauer, for instance, in those formats, because they don't share a common axis or space.
3. You might want to use lines instead of bars, depending on what you're trying to show. In fact, if you just think of using "small graphs" instead of sparklines (which seem to have taken on a predefined format), you'll discover more and better uses.
I'm a fan of Sparklines (as I've noted earlier), but I think that better identification of what they represent would definately help. And I wonder if the line sparklines might work better in some instances than the bar sparklines. I definately vote yes on this, but it might take a little bit of ironing out to figure out the best places to use them. Selective use is important - you don't want to clog the page up with sparklines everywhere.
