Visualization VocabularyDataviz vocabulary
Diagram: horizon chart
Drawing: Adrien Taudière (CC0)
ggplot2 example: horizon chart
Adrien Taudière (CC0); R code ↓; data: Farr 1852, via HistData (Friendly et al. 2026) (GPL)

Classification

  • chart
  • lines and areas › areas
  • change over time
  • the name evokes: nature

Channels

Attestation

Scientific literature

OpenAlex: 56 papers since 2013, 48% in the last five years; mostly in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics and Astronomy; Wikidata

Seminal references

R packages

R code of the ggplot2 example

library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)
library(HistData)

## Each series cut into bands of 200 deaths a day, laid on top of each
## other: the darker the band, the higher the count.
band <- 200
bands <- CholeraDeaths1849 |>
  select(date, cause_of_death, deaths) |>
  expand_grid(level = 1:6) |>
  mutate(height = pmin(pmax(deaths - (level - 1) * band, 0), band)) |>
  filter(level <= ceiling(max(deaths) / band))

p <- ggplot(bands, aes(x = date, ymin = 0, ymax = height, fill = factor(level))) +
  geom_ribbon() +
  facet_wrap(~cause_of_death, ncol = 1, strip.position = "left") +
  scale_fill_manual(values = idest_seq) +
  scale_x_date(date_breaks = "2 months", labels = scales::label_date("%b", locale = "en"),
               expand = c(0, 0)) +
  scale_y_continuous("Deaths a day, within a band", breaks = c(0, 100, 200), expand = c(0, 0)) +
  labs(title = "Cholera deaths peaked on September 6, 1849",
       subtitle = "Daily deaths in England; each darker band adds 200 deaths a day; peaks: cholera 1\u2009121 on September 6, diarrhea 218 on September 10",
       x = NULL,
       caption = "Data: Farr 1852, via the HistData R package") +
  theme_lex_viz(grid = "", arrows = "") +
  theme(legend.position = "none", panel.spacing = unit(4, "mm"))

Sources (8)

20 occurrences in the corpus; indexed by 2 books

Cite this entry

Stable addresshttps://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/horizon-chart.html

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

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

Page created on 2026-10-13. Text last changed on 2026-11-02. Images last changed on 2026-11-12. Numbers computed on 2026-10-22.