Readings on statistical graphics

Good advice and good practice for the display of statistical data
experienced a renaissance of sorts in the 1980s and 1990s, due
primarily to the work of

Cleveland, William S. (1994).  The Elements of Graphing Data,
revised ed., Murray Hill, NJ: AT&T Bell Laboratories.

(The ideas in this book infuse basic graphics in R.)

and

Tufte, Edward R. (1983).  The Visual Display of Quantitative
Information, 1983, Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.

(Tufte has written other great books on a "theory and grammar of
style" for visual displays but this is the book that started it all,
and it is still a great book.)

More recently it's interesting to browse Hadley Wickham's 2008 PhD
thesis (easy to find online), though I don't completely agree with
everything that Wickham does (he tends to enforce his rules a bit too
dogmatically for my taste).

Here is what I would like you to read and comment on for next
Tuesday's class:

* https://moz.com/blog/data-visualization-principles-lessons-from-tufte
  
  This blog post is all about making infographics online that are more
  likely to go viral.  I like it because it distills into 10 fairly
  memorable rules the main advice that Tufte has about creating good
  graphs.
 
* http://abacus.bates.edu/~ganderso/biology/resources/writing/HTWtablefigs.html

  This web article contains lots of basic information about making
  basic, attractive tables and graphs for displaying data in
  scientific articles. I especially like the description of the
  anatomy of a table (note the neat and easy to read appearance when
  horizontal lines are drawn lightly and used sparingly, and vertical
  lines are replaced with whitespace), and the anatomy of a graph, and
  the discussion of the relationship of tables, graphs and captions
  with the text of your article.

* http://libraryassessment.org/bm~doc/workshop_lyons_ray.pdf

  Finally, these slides from a workshop give a plethora of good and
  bad examples of graphical material, following the principles of
  Tufte and Cleveland.  One thing that I find remarkable is how
  difficult it is to construct a digestible graph that displays more
  than 2 or 3 dimensions (and 3 is already hard!).

I would like you to read the first two web articles above somewhat
carefully, and thumb through the third article (or slides) to get a
sense of what's there.

Then I would like you to make a post in the discussion for this
assignment.  Your comment can either be about

* the theory/grammar/elements of digestible, informative graphs and
  tables,

* how graphs and tables are (or should be) incorporated into a paper

* and/or something else related

If possible, please incliude an example of what you are talking about
(and cite its source of course) in your post.

-BJ

ps - Some of us make graphs of mathematical objects (functions,
objects in geometric spaces, etc.) rather than graphs of data.  But I
haven't been able to find the "Tufte of mathematical graphs".  I put
some feelers out; we'll see what I get.  Do any of you know of such a
person?