Michael Friendly's

A Brief History of the Mosaic Display

  • Michael Friendly.
  • A Brief History of the Mosaic Display.
  • Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 89–107, 2002.

Download: from web


This paper provides an illustrated history of the visual and conceptual ideas leading to the development of mosaic displays. We trace the origins of the use of rectangles and area to depict data quantities and their relations, of early forms of mosaic displays including sub-divided bar-like charts and various cartograms, to the modern forms used in log-linear analysis and in space-filling tree maps.

Keywords: data visualization; space-filling displays, cartogram, thematic cartography, log-linear models, mosaic matrix, tree map

@Article{Friendly02mosahist,
  author = {Michael Friendly},
  year = {2002},
  title = {A Brief History of the Mosaic Display},
  journal = {Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics},
  volume = {11},
  number = {1},
  pages = {89–107},
  url = {http://datavis.ca/papers/moshist.pdf},
}