Time Maps: Visualizing Discrete Events Across Many Timescales

Discrete events pervade our daily lives. These include phone calls, online transactions, and heartbeats. Despite the simplicity of discrete event data, it’s hard to visualize many events over a long time period without hiding details about shorter timescales.

The plot below illustrates this problem. It shows the number of website visits made by a certain IP address over the course of 7 months. It was built from discrete event data. The height of each bar is the number of events that occurred...