Speaking of Edward Tufte (see below), sparklines are a type of information graphics characterized by their small size and data density named by Tufte. Sparklines were used by sites reporting the 2008 election and were first introduced on MeFi in 2005. There are now several ways to put sparklines on your own web site including: a simple jQuery plugin, a downloadable PHP library, a dynamic generator using a Python CGI program, and even a library for Ruby on Rails.
posted by netbros on Feb 27, 2009 - 8 comments

Lightweight data exploration: simple, sparkline-esque graphs in Excel.via infosthetics.
posted by signal on Aug 19, 2006 - 15 comments

A Bright, Shiny Service: Sparklines A web service implementation of Edward Tufte’s sparklines idea, in Python.
posted by signal on Jun 24, 2005 - 11 comments