How to Graph Badly or What NOT to Do
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چکیده
“Chartjunk” is Edward Tufte’s term for extraneous features that add nothing to the information content of a graph. The worst collections of chartjunk are illustrations in newspapers and non-technical magazines. These figures are drawn by professional artists who are art-school graduates. To them, aesthetic beauty or visual interest is more important than statistics or the shape of a transcendental function. Indeed, many artists had their interests pushed towards art by flunking mathematics and/or science courses! Furthermore, drawing a minimalist graph — just the curves, M’am — is rather boring to an artist who spent years and years in college creating complex drawings and paintings with subtle shadings and color variations. For all these reasons, commercial artists tend to decorate even the simplest graphs — perhaps especially the simplest graphs — with lots of extraneous decoration, i. e., chartjunk. Instead of a simple bar graph in which the height of the bar is proportional to the quantity being graphed, such as the annual oil production of a given country, the artist will draw fancy oil barrels of different sizes whose area is proportional to oil production. The oil barrels will draw the newspaper reader’s eye to the graph, but the information is not improved at all by replacing bars by barrels. Indeed, the quantitative usefulness of the graph is actually reduced. Psychological studies have shown that people are much worse at estimating areas than lengths. If one asks a person to compare the relative magnitude of two areas, the
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