Snapshot plots: displaying summary tables as parallel univariate plots with consistent color highlighting

For empirical studies, social and health scientists give background characteristics of their sample and summarize them in the famous "Table 1". When treatment/ control groups are present, this table gives summary statistics by group to see whether the background characteristics differ by group. We propose snapshot plots --- parallel univariate plots with consistent highlighting --- to visualize such tables. Compared to "Table 1", such plots are designed to facilitate comparisons of background characteristics --- in particular among groups --- and give more detail on numerical variables. We provide a web app as well as a python implementation of snapshot plots. Snapshot plots arise as edge cases of hammock plots (parallel coordinate plots for mixed categorical/ numerical data). We demonstrate the usefulness of snapshot plots for two "Table 1"s.