Visualizing really long lists of data

Starting from a data source there’s six steps:

1. Data source => string … For .fa files this is just stripping out non bp characters
2. String => segment … Here it’s just fixed size segments, 100,000 bp
3. Segment =>pattern … Pattern is collection of fixed size 8bp units plus how many times they occur in the segment
4. Pattern => pattern … Transformations, not doing that yet
5. Grid of pattern combinations … Intersection of common units, sum of minimum counts
6. Grid of results to colors … This is mapping numbers onto set of colors, actually not as simple as it seems, distribution is kind of weird