Bar Graphs at Em Height

By Henry Woodbury

In his forthcoming book, Beautiful Evidence (2006), Edward R. Tufte explores the idea of “sparklines,” simple graphs whose y-axis is scaled to the height of a line of text. A draft chapter of Beautiful Evidence provides many examples of the concept and is accompanied by additional comments from Tufte and others.

I came across sparklines on David Pinto’s Baseball Musings site, where he has recently experimented with text-height graphs for such data sets as strikeouts per game (Jason Schmidt) and hits per game (Joe Mauer vs. Alex Rios).

Pinto credits Joe Gregorio who created the Baseball Musings sparklines on his online image generator. Gregorio, in turn, links to Tufte.