Jesse Wolfhagen writes:
I was surprised to see a reference to you in a Quartz opinion piece entitled “Stop making charts when a table is better”. While the piece itself makes that case that there are many kinds of charts that are simply restatements of tabular data, I was surprised that you came up as an advocate of tables being a “more honest” way to present information. It seems hard to see downstream effects by looking solely at tables.
So then I looked at the link, which led me to your blog post from 2009. Specifically, from April 1, 2009. Yes, like any good satire, your post was taken at face value!
So while yes, there are reasons for tables and reasons for charts and misuses of both formats, I might humbly suggest you put a tag on your future April 1 posts (on, say April 2), because it’s the internet age: satire and close inspection of dates are dead, but text searching and confirmation bias are alive and well.
Yup. For anyone who has further interest in the particular topic of tables and graphs, I recommend this paper from 2011, which begins:
The statistical community is divided when it comes to graphical methods and models. Graphics researchers tend to disparage models and to focus on direct representations of data, mediated perhaps by research on perceptions but certainly not by probability distributions. From the other side, modelers tend to think of graphics as a cute toy for exploring raw data but not much help when it comes to the serious business of modeling. In order to better understand the benefits and limitations of graphs in statistical analysis, this article presents a series of criticisms of graphical methods in the voice of a hypothetical old-school analytical statistician or social scientist. We hope to elicit elaborations and extensions of these and other arguments on the limitations of graphics, along with responses from graphical researchers who might have different perceptions of these issues.
Still relevant seven years later, I think.