Home / Brinton, Willard C. Graphic Methods for Presenting Facts. New York: The Engineering Magazine Company, 1914. Internet Archive identifier: cu31924032626792 (Cornell University Library copy). The first American textbook on what we now call data visualization. / Passage

Graphic Methods for Presenting Facts

Brinton, Willard C. Graphic Methods for Presenting Facts. New York: The Engineering Magazine Company, 1914. Internet Archive identifier: cu31924032626792 (Cornell University Library copy). The first American textbook on what we now call data visualization. 275 words

The same data may be seen portrayed in a different way in Fig. 6. The arrangement of Fig. 6 is more desirable, in that the size of the components is more readily grasped when all are shown in the same horizontal bar. In Fig. 28 the eye does not readily make the addition necessary to fit together the four items "Single," "Married," "Widowed," and "Divorced" as percentages of the total 100 per cent in each group.

The drawing in Fig. 29 is a portion of an illustration intended to show how far different kinds of trucks could travel for an expend-

SIMPLE COMPARISONS

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iture of one dollar. The placing of these trucks on different levels is somewhat confusing, but it was done in order that one truck would not have to be shown back of another. Note the bars behind each truck, to give the component parts of the total expenditure split into different kinds of charges. This chart is grossly misleading because the point where the race started is not shown. It appears, for instance, that for one dollar expended a five-ton gasoline truck will run about twice as far as a five-ton horse truck. This conclusion is entirely unwarranted, and would not be reached by any reader if the chart had been so drawn that the zero point or starting point for the race had been shown to scale at the left end of the chart.