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tophtucker

Line chart scroller

(Scroll or mouse over table.)

It is hard to show a lot of lines at once on a line chart. It's especially hard when the lines are rough and jaggedy and nowhere-differentiable like, say, stock price charts (because in a true random walk it's impossible to disambiguate an intersection — neither line has any "momentum", so as your eye goes past, it's equiprobable that the lines crossed vs. just touched and bounced away). It gets basically illegible after, like, 3 paths. So here's an approach to scrolling through a set of time series inspired by @armollica's lovely 2D/3D scatterplot.

You can imagine a lot of fixes and variations...

I wanna try some kind of analogue to "adaptive resampling" (drawing cruder lines as you add lines to hold the total 'entropy' of the visualization constant, eventually degenerating to a slopegraph of arbitrarily many lines). Also some kind of abstract analogue to (or just application of?) van Wijk Smooth Zooming.