Treemaps are a valuable tool for visualizing data in a space-filling manner. While commonly used for displaying files on a disk, they can be adapted to explore and navigate messy data blobs. Treemaps are flexible and can be used to visualize any tree-like data, such as JSON or edn. The size of each rectangle in a treemap is proportional to the size of its associated tree node and its children. Different techniques can be employed to improve treemaps, such as incorporating data types, depth, grouping, hierarchy lines, and labels. Treemaps excel at displaying hierarchical and approximately square data, but struggle with wide and shallow or thin and deep data. Other data visualization tools, such as pprint and data browsers, offer different advantages and complement treemaps. Future work can focus on improving the layout, exploring non-rectangular treemaps, alternative coloring schemes, and incorporating graphic design principles. Overall, treemaps are a powerful visualization tool with room for experimentation and improvement.
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