The Statistical Graphics blog brings us news of two great articles from Robert Kosara, Andrew Gelman, and Antony Unwin in the most recent Statistical Computing and Graphics Newsletter. First up in a great infovis article from Robert Kosara emphasizing how Visualization is more than just “pretty pictures”.
Information visualization is a field that has had trouble defining its boundaries, and that consequently is often misunderstood. It doesn’t help that InfoVis, as it is also known, produces pretty pictures that people like to look at and link to or send around. But InfoVis is more than pretty pictures, and it is more than statistical graphics.
Then Andrew Gelman and Antony Unwin take a stab at the untapped field of statistical graphics in another great article.
Within academic statistics (and statistically-inclined applied fields such as economics, sociology, and epidemiology), graphical methods tend to be seen as diversions from more “serious” analytical techniques. Statistics journals rarely cover graphical methods, and Howard Wainer has reported that, even in the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 80% of the articles are about computation, only 20% about graphics.
The entire newsletter is available as a free PDF, so go check it out!
