Pseudocode is an informal high-level description of the operating principle of a computer program or other algorithm. People write pseudocode to isolate the “bigger picture” of an algorithm. Pseudocode doesn’t care about the particular implementation details that are secondary to the problem, such as memory management, dealing with different encoding, etc. Writing out the pseudocode version of a function is frequently the first step in planning the implementation of complex logic.
Similarly, I use sketches when I plan non-trivial charts, and when I discuss data visualization alternatives with colleagues or students.
One can use a sheet of paper, a whiteboard, or a drawing application. You may recognize this approach as a form of “paper prototyping,” but it deserves its own term. I suggest calling such a sketch a “pseudochart”*. Like a piece of pseudocode, the purpose of a pseudochart is to show the visualization approach to the data, not the final graph itself.
* Initially, I wanted to use the term “pseudograph” but the network scientists already took it for themselves.
** The first sentence of this post is a taken from the Wikipedia.
Boris Gorelik 