
Is your chart a detective story or a police report? - fremden
https://www.wired.com/story/is-your-chart-a-detective-story-or-a-police-report/
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troelsSteegin
Wired? - I did not expect this to be article to be good, and it turns out to
be very worthwhile. The article is by Andrew Gelman, an authority on
statistical modeling, and Jessica Hullman, an authority on statistical
visualization. In my words, they make the point that a data visualization is a
kind of a model, and as such the foremost job of the viz is to frame a
judgment (a specific comparison) by the viewer.

In their words: "This connects back to our idea of graphs as comparisons. The
viewing, and hence the construction, of any graph is enhanced by an
understanding of the comparison that it represents. As scientists, we can make
better graphs if we go beyond the idea of “displaying data” to consider the
model we’d like to present, including the reference to which we want the data
to be implicitly compared. As consumers of scientific information, we can
better read an infographic by being aware that its function is to tell a story
through comparisons, which unfold through our own active participation."

