Visualization VocabularyDataviz vocabulary
Diagram: wheat plot
Drawing: Adrien Taudière (CC0)
ggplot2 example: wheat plot
Adrien Taudière (CC0); R code ↓; data: Michelson 1882, via HistData (Friendly et al. 2026) (GPL)

chart

wheat plot

Dot plot binned like a histogram in which each dot stays at its exact value.

Classification

  • chart
  • points and bubbles › dot strips
  • distribution
  • the name evokes: nature

Attestation

Scientific literature

OpenAlex: 508 papers since 1935, 19% in the last five years; mostly in Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Environmental Science, Engineering

Seminal references

R code of the ggplot2 example

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

## Binned as for a histogram, 50 km/s wide, but each dot stays at its exact
## value: within a bin, dots climb in order of value.
light <- Michelson |>
  mutate(speed = velocity + 299000, bin = floor(velocity / 50)) |>
  arrange(speed) |>
  group_by(bin) |>
  mutate(height = row_number()) |>
  ungroup()

p <- ggplot(light, aes(x = speed, y = height)) +
  geom_vline(xintercept = 299734.5, colour = "#9b2367", linewidth = 0.5) +
  annotate("text", x = 299734.5, y = 15.5, label = "Today's value, in air", colour = "#9b2367",
           hjust = 1, nudge_x = -8, size = 3.2) +
  geom_point(size = 2, colour = "#535353") +
  scale_x_continuous(labels = lex_number, breaks = lex_break_breaks, expand = lex_break_expand) +
  scale_y_continuous(NULL, breaks = NULL, limits = c(0.5, 16.5)) +
  labs(title = "Nearly all of Michelson's measurements overshoot",
       subtitle = "Speed of light measured 100 times in 1879, in 50 km/s bins",
       x = "Speed of light (km/s)",
       caption = "Data: Michelson 1882, via the HistData R package") +
  theme_lex_viz(grid = "", arrows = "x", break_not_zero = "x")

Sources (2)

10 occurrences in the corpus; indexed by 1 book

Cite this entry

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

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

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

Page created on 2026-10-13. Text last changed on 2026-10-22. Images last changed on 2026-11-09. Numbers computed on 2026-10-22.