This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
Imagine a science textbook without images. No charts, no graphs, no illustrations or diagrams with arrows and labels. The science would be a lot harder to understand.
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That's because humans are visual creatures by nature. People absorb information in graphic form that would elude them in words. Images are effective for all kinds of storytelling, especially when the story is complicated, as it so often is with science. Scientific visuals can be essential for analyzing data, communicating experimental results and even for making surprising discoveries.
Visualizations can reveal patterns, trends and connections in data that are difficult or impossible to find any other way, says Bang Wong, creative director of MIT's Broad Institute. "Plotting the data allows us to see the underlying structure of the data that you wouldn't otherwise see if you're looking at a table."
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Comments
Why Not Use Control Charts and Pareto Charts?
Based on my study of improvement posters at quality conferences, the vast majority of charts are line and bar charts, followed by pie charts.
All too often, people use bar charts for time series data when they could use control charts.
People also use line or bar charts with trendlines to show "improvement." Most of these trendlines are a poor fit for the data. In most cases there has been no improvement.
Here is the same data as a control chart:
Start using control charts instead of line charts. Pareto charts instead of bar or pie charts.
Your quality improvement projects will start to deliver meaningful results.
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