Visual Fingerprints for Detecting Data Characteristics

Keywords

Charts, Diagrams, and Plots

Abstract

Compact visualizations are often used to detect expected and unexpected data characteristics at a glance. The literature uses the terms fingerprints, thumbnails, or sketches for these bite-sized visualizations. To date, these visualizations have not been described in context and their discussion is fragmented across publications. In this paper, we propose the term Visual Fingerprints for these visualizations, highlight the task of visual detection for which they are designed, outline their visual properties, and discuss their commonalities and differences with related concepts. In doing so, we aim to bundle the existing research on these visualizations into a common concept and term that serves as a foundation and stepping stone for future developments in this direction.