Sparkline

A sparkline is a small intense, simple, word-sized graphic with typographic resolution. Sparklines mean that graphics are no longer cartoonish special occasions with captions and boxes, but rather sparkline graphics can be everywhere a word or number can be: embedded in a sentence, table, headline, map, spreadsheet, graphic. Data graphics should have the resolution of typography. (Edward Tufte, Beautiful Evidence, 46-63.)

Examples

  • twitter analysis

  • Thomas Taubner, Dmitriy Korobkin, Yaroslav Urzhumov, Gennady Shvets, Rainer Hillenbrand, "Near-Field Microscopy Through a SiC Superlens," Science, 313 (15 September 2006), p. 1595.

  • Apple Watch sparkline