FlowingData - 40 years of boxplots

You're subscribed to the blog. Now get the book! Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. Contents: 40 years of boxplots 40 years of boxplots Dec 06, 2011 12:54 am  •  Permalink Famed statistician John Tukey created the boxplot in 1970. It shows a distribution summary in a small amount of space. Hadley Wickham and Lisa Stryjewski look back on the old standby and its evolution up to present. Keep it in mind, while still used today, the boxplot was created with pencil and paper. One of the original constraints on the boxplot was that it was designed to be computed and drawn by hand. As every statistician now has a computer on their desk, this constraint can be relaxed, allowing variations of the boxplot that are substantially more complex. These variations attempt to display more information about the distribution, maintaing the compact size of the boxplot, but bringing in the richer distributional summary of the histogram or density plot. These plots can overcome problems in the original such as the failure to display multi-modality, or the excessive number of "outliers" when n is large. Alright, computers are useful. I guess. [40 years of boxplots] More to read: What seven billion people looks like Smiley installation shows the mood of a city Shan Carter on data storytelling Four degrees of separation Do you need a data scientist?  follow on Twitter | forward to a friend  Copyright © 2011 FlowingData, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in on FlowingData. Our mailing address is: FlowingData PO Box 3381 Livermore, CA 94550 Add us to your address book  unsubscribe from this list | update subscription preferences