CIS 3365 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: John Tukey, Chartjunk, Bell Labs

• School: University of Houston
• Department: Computer Information Systems
• Course: CIS 3365
• Professor: Xuqing Wu

Document Summary

Data graphics visually display measured quantities by means of the combined use of points, lines, a coordinate system, numbers, words, shading and colour. The use of abstract, non-representational pictures to show numbers is a surprisingly recent invention, perhaps because of the diversity of skills required: visual-artistic, empirical-statistical, and mathematical. It was not until 1750-1800 that statistical graphics were invented, long after cartesian coordinates, logarithms, the calculus, and the basics of probability theory. William playfair (1759-1823) developed/improved upon (nearly) all fundamental graphical designs, seeking to replace conventional tables of numbers with systematic visual representations. A scottish engineer and a political economist the founder of graphical methods of statistics a pioneer of information graphics. Modern data graphics can do much more than simply substitute for statistical tables. Graphics are instruments for reasoning about quantitative information. Often, the most efficient way to describe, explore, and summarize a set of numbers (even a very large set) is to look at pictures of those numbers.