Toward a function library for statistical plotting with XSLT and SVG

Computational textual humanities research often makes use of descriptive statistics and graphic visualization to communicate quantitative information about textual objects of study. SVG is capable of rendering any chart or graph a user might wish to deploy, but there is no standardized function library for XSLT or XQuery comparable to, for example, the support for statistical analysis and visualization available in Python Pandas, Julia, and R. Neither is there any standard XSLT or XPath visualization library comparable to the D3.js (“Data-Driven Design”) JavaScript library that has come to dominate high-quality informational graphics on the World Wide Web. This paper begins to explore the possibility of developing such library resources without leaving the XML ecosystem.