Minimizing Overlapping Labels in Interactive Visualizations

An extremely efficient, greedy algorithm for automatic label placement with surprisingly strong results.

Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider
Towards Data Science
4 min readJul 23, 2020

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Visualization of New COVID-19 Cases /Day of every state in the United States, with no label placement algorithm.

One of the most challenging areas of user-controlled and real-time data visualization is label placement. In many of my visualizations, I attempt to design visualizations where labels cannot…

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Teaching Associate Professor of Computer Science at The University of Illinois (🧡💙); loves data and creating interactive data-forward visualizations.