Facets

Abstract

The English word facet is derived from the Latin facies, which means face. A facet implies a little face, such as one of the sides of an object (e.g., a cut diamond) that has many faces. This word is useful for describing an object that creates many little graphics that are variations of a single graphic. In a graphical system, facets are frames of frames. Because of this recursion, facets make frames behave like points in the sense that the center of a frame can be located by coordinates derived from a facet. Thus, we can use facets to make graphs of graphs or tables of graphs. Indeed, tables are graphs. This general conception allows us to create structures of graphs that are more general than the specific examples of multigraphics such as scatterplot matrices (Chambers et al., 1983), row-plots (Carr, 1994), or trellises (Becker and Cleveland, 1996). We can also construct trees and other networks of graphs because we can link together graphic frames in the same way we link points in a network. And we can transform facets as well as frames to make, for example, rectangular arrays of polar graphics or polar arrangements of rectangular graphics. For a similar concept in the field of visualization, see Beshers and Feiner (1993).