Reply To: Ordering categories within categorical variables

#720
Bill Finzer
Keymaster

Hi Traci,

Thanks for your thoughtful response. I can supply the reasoning by which we came to the decision to order a categorical y-axis from “low” to “high” starting at the top instead of the bottom.

It came about 15 years or so ago working on Fathom, CODAP’s predecessor. In Fathom there is a summary table that lists an attribute’s categories as shown in the accompanying screenshot. In the table, it made sense, if there were an ordinality to the categories to list them from top to bottom. Having a different order when the categories were listed on the y-axis was untenable.

In CODAP we don’t (yet) have a summary table. But I think an argument can still be made for the current behavior in that we read (at least in English) from left to right and then from top to bottom. We can view the categories listed on the y-axis as a list, and, in fact, making such a graph is a useful way to view all the categories (provided there aren’t way too many!).

So that’s the story of why categories are ordered left to right or top to bottom. Numerical axes have an origin at the lower left.

I welcome comments from other participants in this forum.

Bill

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