Visualizing Relationships among Categorical Variables

Centuries of chart-making have produced some outstanding charts tailored specifically to the data being visualized. They have also produced a myriad of less-than-outstanding charts in the same vein. I instead present a set of techniques that may be applied to arbitrary datasets with specific properties. In particular, I describe two techniques – Nested Category Maps and Correlation Maps – for visualizing, analyzing, and exploring multi-dimensional sets of categorical and ordinal data. I also describe an implementation of these two techniques.