New blog post! Updated for 2024, my favorite example of why alphabetical ordering is bad for geographic features -- US presidential results since 1828. The left image shows regional patterns in a geographic ordering that the right (alphabetical) simply loses. https://benschmidt.org/post/2024-11-24-stateorder/
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and the latter generally seems more useful, especially if it's an interactive viz and someone can search for a state
"Bertify" > https://www.aviz.fr/bertifier
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:r36govxkk4hmrcqlrjmbrjtl/post/3lcb4ljbutk24
While Bertin's advances in matrix visualization are mostly ignored in the networks, spreadsheet, and infovis crowd, "Semiology of Graphics" (fr. 1967 & engl. 2010) remains as foundational as Helmholtz's "Optics".
Bertin just comes to mind as your matrices clearly show resonances that beg to be sorted together, resulting in a meaningful emerging order, not driven by a priori properties.
“everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.”
1. I've *never* seen a non-alphabetic ordering used when alphabetic would be better, while people frequently default to alphabetic;
2. It's really very fast find a state in geographic ordering; you globally scan for the region and then zero in where it matches.