chart

step chart

Line with plateaus marking discrete changes.

Classification

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

Channels

position on common scale; main: value (steps)

Variants

empirical cumulative distribution functionspecial case

Scientific literature

OpenAlex: 47 papers since 1993, 28% in the last five years; mostly in Medicine, Computer Science, Social Sciences

R packages

R ggplot2::geom_step(); GitHub 7 025 stars; last commit 2026-10; paper (33 455 citations)

R code of the ggplot2 example

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

## December 1841 is missing: its step is left out.
mortality <- Handwashing.monthly |>
  filter(!is.na(deaths)) |>
  mutate(rate = 100 * deaths / births)

p <- ggplot(mortality, aes(x = date, y = rate)) +
  geom_step(linewidth = 0.5, colour = "#9b2367") +
  geom_vline(xintercept = as.Date("1847-05-15"), colour = "#535353", linewidth = 0.4, linetype = "dashed") +
  annotate("text", x = as.Date("1847-03-01"), y = 29, label = "Chlorine handwashing\nfrom mid-May 1847",
           hjust = 1, vjust = 1, size = 3.2, colour = "#535353", lineheight = 0.9) +
  scale_x_date(date_breaks = "1 year", date_labels = "%Y", expand = expansion(mult = 0.01)) +
  scale_y_continuous(labels = lex_number, limits = c(0, NA), expand = expansion(mult = c(0, 0.05))) +
  labs(title = "Deaths in childbirth fell fivefold with handwashing",
       subtitle = "Monthly deaths in the First Clinic of the Vienna maternity hospital, 1841–1849",
       x = NULL, y = "Mothers who died (% of births)",
       caption = "Data: Semmelweis 1861, via the HistData R package") +
  theme_lex_viz(grid = "y")

Sources (6)

21 occurrences in the corpus; indexed by 1 book

Cite this entry

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

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

BibTeX

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

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