Notes
The Aim of Good Data Graphics is to Display Data Accurately and Clearly
Of good graphs it may be said what Mark Van Doren observed about brilliant conversationalists:
In their presence others speak well.
A good graph is quiet and lets the data tell their story clearly and completely.
Misleading graphics:
1) Truncated axis.
2) Double y axis.
3) Unequal histogram bins
4) Incorrect extrapolation of 1-d data to 2-d to magnify changes (Tufte's Lie Factor).
5) Context matters.
6) Ethics matters.
7) Emphasize the trivial (unrelated) and ignore the essential.
"I gather, young man, that you wish to be a Member of Parliament. The first lesson that you must learn is, when I call for statistics about the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies died when I was Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime Minister. That is a political statistic." Winston Churchill (1874-1965)