Chernoff face

The individual parts, such as eyes, ears, mouth, and nose represent values of the variables by their shape, size, placement, and orientation.

Edward Tufte, presenting such a diagram, says that this kind of Chernoff-face graph would "reduce well, maintaining legibility even with individual areas of 0.05 square inches as shown ... with cartoon faces and even numbers becoming data measures, we would appear to have reached the limit of graphical economy of presentation, imagination, and let it be admitted, eccentricity".

[5] In Peter Watts' novel Blindsight (2006), a transhuman character is seen using a variant of Chernoff faces.

This use is explained by the character as a more efficient method of representing data, for a large portion of the human brain is devoted to facial recognition.

[6] In the 2014 sci-fi short story "Degrees of Freedom" by Karl Schroeder, Chernoff faces make a prominent appearance as a future technology, supporting the communication of aggregate sentiment and perspective.