Diagram: treemap — Drawing: Adrien Taudière (CC0)

ggplot2 example: treemap — Adrien Taudière (CC0); R code ↓; data: gapminder (Bryan 2025) (CC BY 4.0)

Wikidata image: treemap — Luc Girardin (CC BY 3.0); Wikimedia Commons; item Q838583

chart

treemap

Hierarchy tiled with nested rectangles sized by value.

Classification

chart
sectors, tilings and units › tilings
part-to-whole; Financial Times Visual Vocabulary
the name evokes: nature

Channels

area; main: value (Munzner: area marks and nesting); Munzner 2014
spatial region; main: hierarchy (nesting); Munzner 2014
color hue; secondary: category; Munzner 2014

Variants

circle packingcircles

Attestation

English definition: Data Visualisation Guide, data.europa.eu

Scientific literature

OpenAlex: 1 857 papers since 1992, 32% in the last five years; mostly in Computer Science, Social Sciences, Agricultural and Biological Sciences; Wikidata

Seminal references

first known use (1874) Walker (1874). Statistical Atlas of the United States, Based on the Results of the Ninth Census; Ciuccarelli 2026
formalization (1991) Johnson & Shneiderman (1991). Tree-maps: a space-filling approach to the visualization of hierarchical information structures. Proceedings Visualization '91 (637 citations)
diffusion (1992) Shneiderman (1992). Tree visualization with tree-maps. ACM Transactions on Graphics (1 338 citations); Friendly & Denis 2001

R packages

R treemapify::geom_treemap(); GitHub 223 stars; last commit 2026-07

R code of the ggplot2 example

library(ggplot2)
library(treemapify)
library(dplyr)
library(gapminder)

population <- gapminder |>
  filter(year == 2007)

p <- ggplot(population, aes(area = pop, fill = continent, subgroup = continent, label = country)) +
  geom_treemap(colour = "white", size = 0.5) +
  geom_treemap_subgroup_border(colour = "white", size = 2.5) +
  geom_treemap_text(family = "Quicksand", colour = "black", place = "topleft",
                    padding.x = grid::unit(1.5, "mm"), padding.y = grid::unit(1.5, "mm"),
                    size = 9, min.size = 6) +
  scale_fill_manual(values = continent_colors) +
  labs(title = "Nearly two in five people live in China or India",
       subtitle = "142 countries in 2007, one rectangle per country",
       fill = NULL,
       caption = "Data: Gapminder, via the gapminder R package") +
  theme_lex_viz(grid = "", arrows = "")

Sources (47)

460 occurrences in the corpus; indexed by 18 books

Show the 47 sources

Cite this entry

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

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

BibTeX

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

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