January 24, 2019 at 12:39 am
#813
Participant
Another take on this: Andee’s situation is one in which the State’s name or abbreviation is _unique_ in the data set. If we knew an attribute was not only categorical but also unique, we could conceivably do what Andee found natural: sort the table any way you want, and then plot the cases.
I bet it would not be too hard (ha ha ha) to determine automatically if an attribute had this “unique” property.
This may be part of the broader issue of “roles of attributes” where another one we have discussed is “time-like,” so that some time-series things might happen naturally in visualizations if it were on an axis.