"Information that is imperfectly acquired, is generally as imperfectly retained; and a man who has carefully investigated a printed table, finds, when done, that he has only a very faint and partial idea of what he has read; and that like a figure imprinted on sand, is soon totally erased and defaced." (William Playfair, "The Commercial and Political Atlas", 1786)
"[…] it must be noticed that these diagrams do not naturally harmonize with the propositions of ordinary life or ordinary logic. […] The great bulk of the propositions which we commonly meet with are founded, and rightly founded, on an imperfect knowledge of the actual mutual relations of the implied classes to one another. […] one very marked characteristic about these circular diagrams is that they forbid the natural expression of such uncertainty, and are therefore only directly applicable to a very small number of such propositions as we commonly meet with." (John Venn, "On the Diagrammatic and Mechanical Representation of Propositions and Reasonings", 1880)
"Planning is essentially the analysis and measurement of materials and processes in advance of the event and the perfection of records so that we may know exactly where we are at any given moment. In short it is attempting to steer each operation and department by chart and compass and chronometer - not by guess and by God." (Lyndall Urwick, "The Pattern of Management", 1956)
"Skewness is a measure of symmetry. For example, it's zero for the bell-shaped normal curve, which is perfectly symmetric about its mean. Kurtosis is a measure of the peakedness, or fat-tailedness, of a distribution. Thus, it measures the likelihood of extreme values." (John L Casti, "Reality Rules: Picturing the world in mathematics", 1992)
"Clearly principles and guidelines for good presentation graphics have a role to play in exploratory graphics, but personal taste and individual working style also play important roles. The same data may be presented in many alternative ways, and taste and customs differ as to what is regarded as a good presentation graphic. Nevertheless, there are principles that should be respected and guidelines that are generally worth following. No one should expect a perfect consensus where graphics are concerned." (Antony Unwin, Good Graphics?"[in "Handbook of Data Visualization"], 2008)
"Once these different measures of performance are consolidated into a single number, that statistic can be used to make comparisons […] The advantage of any index is that it consolidates lots of complex information into a single number. We can then rank things that otherwise defy simple comparison […] Any index is highly sensitive to the descriptive statistics that are cobbled together to build it, and to the weight given to each of those components. As a result, indices range from useful but imperfect tools to complete charades." (Charles Wheelan, "Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data", 2012)
"The correlation coefficient has two fabulously attractive characteristics. First, for math reasons that have been relegated to the appendix, it is a single number ranging from –1 to 1. A correlation of 1, often described as perfect correlation, means that every change in one variable is associated with an equivalent change in the other variable in the same direction. A correlation of –1, or perfect negative correlation, means that every change in one variable is associated with an equivalent change in the other variable in the opposite direction. The closer the correlation is to 1 or –1, the stronger the association. […] The second attractive feature of the correlation coefficient is that it has no units attached to it. […] The correlation coefficient does a seemingly miraculous thing: It collapses a complex mess of data measured in different units" (like our scatter plots of height and weight) into a single, elegant descriptive statistic." (Charles Wheelan, "Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data", 2012)
"The idiom of scatterplots encodes two quantitative value variables using both the vertical and horizontal spatial position channels, and the mark type is necessarily a point. Scatterplots are effective for the abstract tasks of providing overviews and characterizing distributions, and specifically for finding outliers and extreme values. Scatterplots are also highly effective for the abstract task of judging the correlation between two attributes. With this visual encoding, that task corresponds the easy perceptual judgement of noticing whether the points form a line along the diagonal. The stronger the correlation, the closer the points fall along a perfect diagonal line; positive correlation is an upward slope, and negative is downward." (Tamara Munzner, "Visualization Analysis and Design", 2014)
"A perfectly relevant visualization that breaks a few presentation rules is far more valuable - it’s better - than a perfectly executed, beautiful chart that contains the wrong data, communicates the wrong message, or fails to engage its audience." (Scott Berinato, "Good Charts : the HBR guide to making smarter, more persuasive data visualizations", 2023)
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