Plotting with images

Images can be used to highlight the strengths of your visualization in addition to pure data values. Many examples have proven that by using symbolic images, we map deeper into the viewer's mental model, thereby helping the viewer to remember the visualizations better and for a longer time. One way to do this is to place images where your data is, to map the values to what they represent. The matplotlib library is capable of delivering this functionality, and here we demonstrate how to do it.

Getting ready

We will use the fictional example from the story The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, by Bobby Henderson, where the author correlates the number of pirates with the sea-surface temperature. To highlight this correlation, we will display the size of the pirate ship proportional to the value representing the number of pirates in the year the sea-surface temperature is measured.

We will use Python matplotlib library's ability to annotate using images and text with...