Publications
Our papers that document this collection, and related projects.
Papers
Yu Zhang, Bob Coecke, and Min Chen. ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, 2021. The paper describes reconstructing data from historical visualization images through interactive classification.
OldVisOnline: Curating a Dataset of Historical Visualizations
Yu Zhang, Ruike Jiang, Liwenhan Xie, Yuheng Zhao, Can Liu, Tianhong Ding, Siming Chen, and Xiaoru Yuan. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Proceedings of IEEE VIS), 2023. This paper describes the collection and dataset this site documents.
VisTaxa: Developing a Taxonomy of Historical Visualizations
Yu Zhang, Xinyue Chen, Weili Zheng, Yuhan Guo, Guozheng Li, Siming Chen, and Xiaoru Yuan. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Proceedings of IEEE PacificVis), 2025. This paper describes the taxonomy used in this collection.
Related projects
ZuantuSet: A Collection of Historical Chinese Visualizations and Illustrations
Xiyao Mei, Yu Zhang, Chaofan Yang, Rui Shi, and Xiaoru Yuan. Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2025. This project is a collection of historical Chinese visualizations and illustrations.
How Historians Use Visualization: A Corpus-Driven Mixed-Methods Study
Xinyue Chen, Yu Zhang, Weili Zheng, Chiteng Ma, and Xiaoru Yuan. Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of EuroVis), 2026. This project studies how historians use visualization in research.