Diagram: flow map — Drawing: Adrien Taudière (CC0)

map

flow map

Map showing directed movement between places.

Classification

map
maps › flow maps
spatial; Financial Times Visual Vocabulary

Attestation

English definition: Brinton, Graphic Presentation, 1939 ↗

Scientific literature

OpenAlex: 1 386 papers since 1961, 38% in the last five years; mostly in Computer Science, Earth and Planetary Sciences, Social Sciences; Wikidata

Seminal references

first known use (1837) Harness (1838). Atlas to accompany the second report of the Railway Commissioners, Ireland. H.M.S.O.; Friendly & Denis 2001, Andrews 2017
diffusion (1869) Minard (1869). Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l'armée française dans la campagne de Russie 1812-1813; Friendly & Denis 2001, Andrews 2017
formalization (2005) Phan et al. (2005). Flow map layout. IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, 2005. INFOVIS 2005. (58 citations)

R packages

R ggplot2::geom_curve(); GitHub 7 025 stars; last commit 2026-10; paper (33 455 citations)
R flowmapper::add_flowmap(); GitHub 39 stars; last commit 2025-06

Sources (28)

172 occurrences in the corpus; indexed by 10 books

Show the 28 sources

Cite this entry

Stable addresshttps://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/flow-map.html

ReferenceTaudière Adrien. 2026. flow map. In Visualization Vocabulary, version 1.0.0. IdEst. https://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/flow-map.html

BibTeX

@incollection{taudiere2026-flow-map,
  author    = {Taudière, Adrien},
  title     = {flow map},
  booktitle = {Visualization Vocabulary},
  year      = {2026},
  version   = {1.0.0},
  publisher = {IdEst},
  url       = {https://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/flow-map.html},
  note      = {CC0 1.0}
}

Page created on 2026-10-13. Text last changed on 2026-11-10. Images last changed on 2026-11-10. Numbers computed on 2026-10-22.