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Graphic Presentation (1939)
- cariaso 11y agowow, more Tufte than Tufte and much earlier.
- elijahmeeks 11y agoYou must not know Tufte very well or not have looked very closely at this text. It includes numerous recommendations to use decorative elements in charts, and that kind of thing horrifies Tufte.
- Qwerty404 11y agoit's interesting!
- corysama 11y agoHi, Qwerty404. Welcome to Hacker News! Please note that the HN community takes a rather strict approach when moderating comments that contribute noise to the conversation. "Nice article!" comments are routinely downvoted. As is sarcasm, witticisms, memes, references and other styles of comments that occur frequently but do not contribute to the discussion. It's a knowingly doomed attempt to hold back the flood of noise that covers Reddit.
- brudgers 11y agoBy capturing abstractions over graphic formats it reminds me a bit of Alexander's A Pattern Language and its relationship to buildings. The chapter on Quantitative Cartoons gave me one of those "that thing has a name" moments and afterwhich a previously unremarkable piece of the cultural furniture becomes remarkable because we get a new way of seeing.
- freekh 11y agoWow! This is truly incredible!
- pgrote 11y agoIt really is. the Genealogy and Genetics section was eye opening.
- LiweiZ 11y agoA quick skim through the preview of it reminds me of how improved technologies bring ideas to our daily life. Only with the matured tools, we see more and more applications of many of the ideas from the book. The time/energy cost of bringing them to us was too high.
- sboak 11y agoIt's fascinating to see a book approaching data visualization from first principles, without any preconceived notions or the baggage and confusion of modern tools and techniques
- nothrabannosir 11y ago> How charts ought not to be made https://archive.org/stream/graphicpresentat00brinrich#page/22/mode/1up https://archive.org/stream/graphicpresentat00brinrich#page/2... 75 years later, it seems bad habits die hard.
- elijahmeeks 11y agoI found that part really interesting since the requirement for a zero baseline today is limited to bar charts (see Few) whereas this insists you use it for line charts as well (which most modern data viz textbooks will say is okay because you judge the length of a bar chart but the position of a point in a time series).
- leephillips 11y agoThis senseless insistence on beginning the vertical axis at zero is repeated in Huff's popular book, How to Lie with Statistics, where he also claims that failing to adopt this rule results in "misleading" graphs.
- mjcohen 11y agoIt depends on whether you want to show relative or absolute change. Huff's warning about scales not starting at zero occurs when the chart has a caption such as "A massive five percent growth!" In my experience, not starting a scale at zero often DOES produce a misleading graph.
- pierrec 11y agoIn my (french) high school, we were taught to insert an axis break symbol in line graphs when necessary. See the figure labeled "Indicating a y-axis break" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misleading_graph#Truncated_graph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misleading_graph#Truncated_gra...
- iGoPro_HD 11y agoJust looking at the previews of these makes me want to go back, and watch the making of these. Truly fascinating.
- fizixer 11y agooff-topic but I was looking for a reader of my pdf-to-image converted documents. This reader looks really nice (and in-browser too).