Revisiting Bertin's Matrices

New Interactions for Crafting Tabular Visualizations

Charles Perin, Pierre Dragicevic and Jean-Daniel Fekete


Bertifier is a Web app for rapidly creating tabular visualizations from spreadsheets. It directly draws from Jacques Bertin’s matrix analysis method, whose goal was to "simplify without destroying" by encoding cell values visually and grouping similar rows and columns. These pages contains material that supplement our article (PDF below). The content will be updated and enriched over time.


Download the Paper

Charles Perin, Pierre Dragicevic, Jean-Daniel Fekete (2014). Revisiting Bertin's Matrices: New Interactions for Crafting Tabular Visualizations. TVCG, VIS' 2014.

You should also visit the project page of our physical reproduction of Bertin Matrices that was exposed during the VIS 2015 Bertin Exhibit in Paris.

More details about Crossets here

Try Bertifier

Click on the image above to launch the Bertifier Web App. We suggest you first watch the 5-min video tutorial below.

Video Tutorial

Link to the video tutorial. Set to HD 1080 and full screen.

Other material

Other supplementary material (also on the top menu):

  • Examples. Includes reproductions of historical examples from Bertin and his collaborators re-crafted using Bertifier, and various other bertified datasets.
  • Review of Systems. Links and screenshots of the systems listed in our survey and more details on the scoring schemes used in our review of Bertin implementations
  • User Study. replication and reanalysis material for our user study, including all questionnaire items, data from our user study, and the images produced by participants
  • Annotated Bibliography. An extended annotated bibliography with links to (sometimes difficult to find) material, for the interested reader.
  • Perspectives.

Ackowledgements

We thank authors of previous systems and their past collaborators for providing us with material for our research: Günther Sawitzki, Harri Siirtola, Patrice Mitrano, Philippe Lecarpentier, Joël Le Fourn, Gloria Villarroya and Marie-Françoise Durand; Thanks to Emanuelle Giry and Denise Ogilvie for organizing our visit of Bertin's archives in the Archives Nationales; Yvonne Jansen for providing us with numerous datasets; Yvonne Jansen and Benjamin Bach for their early feedback on the paper; Jeremy Boy for his feedback on the visual design of Bertifier; Jeremy Boy and Nadia Boukhelifa for their voiceovers; Fanny Chevalier for convincing the first author to kickoff the project. Thanks to Renaud Blanch for providing the original implementation of the 'Optimal Leaf Order' computation. His improved version is now available here.

Your feedback

Email all authors

License

All material on this page is CC-BY-SA. If you reuse or adapt it please reference our article and/or link to www.aviz.fr/bertifier.