# What to call this graph showing icons for artists on a horizontal axis indicating number of unique words used?

What type of graph is this developer using?

Copied from here.

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It is the beeswarm version of a stripchart, with photos of the artists in place of dots.

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Awesome. Beeswarm looks like the way to go. Now to implement this with matplotlib using pandas DataFrames! –  hanleyhansen Jun 9 '14 at 21:37
The "closely-packed" criterion for a beeswarm does not seem to apply to the example. Accepting this (for the nonce) as an intended beeswarm gives us a novel example of a significant lie factor :-). –  whuber Jun 9 '14 at 22:53

There is a single numeric axis against which values are plotted and there is some mix of stacking and jittering to separate points that might occlude or overlap each other. Short of the photos, which make the graph distinctive, I have come across the following names for broadly similar plots:

 barcode charts beeswarm plots circle plots dispersal graphs dispersion diagrams dit plots dot charts dot diagrams dot histograms dot plots line charts line plots linear plots number-line plots one-dimensional scatter plots oneway graphs oneway plots point graphs raster plots strip charts strip plots Wilkinson dot plots 

plus several variations of those running words together or using different hyphenation, which I am not quite crazy enough to collect.

Stata users might care to note that these are documented in the help for my stripplot command available from SSC.

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Nice list. Thanks a lot! –  hanleyhansen Jun 9 '14 at 21:41

This is a dot chart with some non-random jittering for legibility.

It it not a dot plot, though there's some superficial similarity.

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There is some superficial similarity, but I would say dot plots usually have many lines with only one or few dots per line. –  gung Jun 9 '14 at 21:37
@gung I think of dot plots as having a histogram-like component that is (or should be) mostly absent here. Judging by the responses here, that is probably not a widely shared view. I was hoping to point out that the artists just shy of 3,600 should be arrayed horizontally given their vocabulary size values, but their current position creates an illusion of a mass point that is unfortunate since this chart is not really a histogram. –  Dimitriy V. Masterov Jun 9 '14 at 21:56
Yeah, I think these names are ultimately somewhat subjective & even arbitrary. @NickCox's post documents some of that. I was just commenting that I wouldn't really call this a "dot plot", but it's a reasonable name nonetheless; I upvoted it anyway. –  gung Jun 9 '14 at 21:59