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28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An effective book for practitioners, and the people who teach them, September 20, 2005
This review is from: Creating More Effective Graphs (Paperback)
This is no coffee table book for the numerati. It is practical handbook for anyone who wants to use graphics to help people to understand data. "One graph is more effective than another," Robbins says, "if its quantitative information can be decoded more quickly or more easily by most observers."
Yes, Robbins can teach you how to lie with statistics by using three-dimensional bar charts, how to confuse by using stacked bar charts, and how to obscure by using the plain old pie chart. But her focus is demonstrating truth-telling techniques that promote understanding by providing visual clarity. Some of these techniques were new to me, such as the dot plot, the jittered strip plot, the trellis display, and the box and whisker plot.
What's a box and whisper plot, you ask? Unlike this review, Robbins book is filled with examples. Most two-page spreads show a graphic on the left page, and one or two paragraphs of text on the other. With a few exceptions, the graphics were generated by Robbins herself, which gives the book a consistent look that is pleasing to the eye.
These two-page spreads help make the book fairly modular. If, for example, you are not familiar with logarithms, you can easily skip over those sections. Read the first three chapters to understand her approach. Read more until you get bored. Then skip, skim and scan, looking for the juicy bits.
Here's one "Scales: Must Zero Be Included?" she asks. It depends, she answers, and illustrates her point with a description of guru Edward Tufte during his workshop on presenting data. Tufte gets up on a table, opens a book, and unfolds a long narrow piece of paper some seven or eight feet long. At the top was a small line graph. At the bottom was the zero.
Although Creating More Effective Graphs is not scholarly in style, Robbins gives due credit to her teachers and sources. Scholars will find the book useful for their academic writing, and teachers of courses such as quantitative methods, critical thinking, and media studies will mine its ideas for their course notes. But the book is squarely aimed at practitioners: economists, business writers, journalists, or anybody who has to back up an assertion with hard data, and wants to illustrate that data with an effective graph.
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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Book on Charting - Good Investment, May 16, 2006
This review is from: Creating More Effective Graphs (Paperback)
This is a great book for those who really want to make their charts/graphs more effective. Robbins' discussion on visual perception helped me understand why pie charts and stacked bar charts are such poor communication tools. Her dot plot examples convinced me to start using them even though Excel doesn't provide a dot plot chart type. I made my own.
My charts are now much better because of this book! While Tufte convinced me that pie charts were bad, Robbins explained why and showed me how to use dot plots to replace pie charts/stacked bar charts. I picked up a number of other important techniques,including cycle plots and trellis displays. She has excellent advice for Excel users, including a link to a dot plot template for Excel.
Her discussion on trellis displays convinced me that there are other charting tools beside Excel that can be used for multivariate charting. I learned about R (free statistics and graphics package) and have started using it so that I can do some of the trellis charting that Robbins explains so well.
Even if you have Tufte's books, you will learn practical aspects of making effective charts with this book. Robbins shows you how to do what Tufte recommends.
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
For Person Unsure of REALLY Changing Graphing Ways: 5 Stars; for more statistical person: 3 Stars, May 29, 2007
This review is from: Creating More Effective Graphs (Paperback)
This book gets 5-stars for those persons that have trepidation about really modifying how they do graphing. For the fearful person, no other book is as gentle, yet effective, at convincing you of the inadequacy of your simple (most likely Excel) ways.
The real point of Effective Graphs (both this book and the subject itself), though, is not making graphs just a little bit better. There's much more substance than a minute improvement in one's graphs. The real point is that data behaviour elucidation has two rather distinct paradigms: (1) the statistical inference paradigm (tables of descriptive statistics, parameter estimation, test statistics, hypothesis testing) or (2) the William S. Cleveland Visualization Paradigm (well-done simple graphs as well as graphs plotting more complex or highly-derivative quantities).
In the statistical inference paradigm, what one sees, literally, is only big bunches of numerals -- the depiction of those abstract entities we call numbers. In point of fact, even if you were literally blind, the statistical inference paradigm of data behaviour elucidation would work just as well for you as it would for a sighted person. In diametrically opposite contrast is the William S. Cleveland Visualization paradigm in which you will literally SEE data behaviours. This is what this book is about.
"Creating More Effective Graphs" is about SEEing data behaviours. The book is therefore targeted to anybody who wants to show data behaviour, but especially those folks not in the scientific or statistical worlds -- although, people in those worlds will also find, as the title suggests, very effective ideas when taken to heart. For the more advanced issues of data behaviour formulated as rather advanced statistical questions, you should refer to William S. Cleveland's book, "Visualizing Data", which shows how even advanced statistical questions can be addressed in the visualization paradigm.
The conclusion is this: if you want to make a truly substantive improvement in data behaviour depiction and elucidation by your graphing, then "Creating More Effective Graphs" will be an admirable companion in this endeavor. If you need a reference on the "whole enchilada" of what is available in the visualization paradigm on data behaviour elucidation including the more advanced statistical issues, then you will need William S. Cleveland's "Visualizing Data" book.
A FOOTNOTE ON COLOR: Other reviewers' talk of color lacking in the book are completely misguided. The visualization paradigm can do so extremely much in purely black and white. Fanciness and color is not what visualization of data behaviours is about. (And need it be pointed out that there is the great convenience of transmitting and reproducing your effective graphics in black & white.) Well-done graphics using principles of human graphical perception (see William S. Cleveland's "Elements of Graphing Data") and often advanced computations in order to construct advanced plots and plot ensembles is the heart of the visualization paradigm. But on the topic of color, William S. Cleveland does give some good advice in his "Visualizing Data" book. (Just as an example, we all think that the "rainbow" scale for visualizing temperatures of an object or scene is the obvious right choice. Cleveland explains how such a choice is BAD for a variety of reasons. The right choice is a mere two hues with varying degrees of lightness to encode the temperatures.)
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