Hey! Susan Kruglinski and I wrote this article I really like, Statistical graphics and comics: Parallel histories of visual storytelling:
What do data visualization and cartoons have in common? One of these is used to communicate in science and journalism, and the other appears in arts and entertainment, but both convey complex messages in economical, intuitive, and visually appealing ways. And both these graphic forms are relatively new, having made rapid progress only in the past few centuries, despite requiring little in the way of raw material to produce. We connect this history to a combination of abstraction and accessibility that is common to both these forms of visual expression: comic strips and scatterplots both now seem intuitive but represent the development of abstract conventions. We also discuss differences between these two methods of visual storytelling in their goals and in how they are experienced by the reader.
Read the whole thing. It has a message I think is important.
But my message to you is: Where should we publish this article? We sent it to the journal American Statistician, which didn’t seem quite right; in any case they agreed with that assessment and told us it would be better to publish somewhere else. But we’re not sure where.
There’s no need for the paper to appear in a statistics journal, or in a “journal” at all–it’s not like we’re getting “publish or perish” credit for it! Lots of non-statistician “civilians” are interested in dataviz and comics, and I’d like to reach some audience beyond whoever’s reading this post right now.
If you have any thoughts on where to publish this article–or, of course, any thoughts on the substance of the article itself–you can just let us know right here in the comments section. Otherwise, just enjoy the article.
Cool article!!! Data visualization is something that has always interested me A lot of years ago I took Edward Tufte’s course when it was offered here in DC. It was worth the modest expense.
A couple of suggestions:
1) Isis, the journal of the History of Science Society https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/isis/current
Pro:Respected academic journal.
Con: reviewers; very externalist in its historiography.
2) Self publish, a la Edward Tufte’s Graphics Press.
Pro: No reviewers, and you can do quality reproduction of the figures.
Con: Costs you money.
I think this would be great for Nightingale
https://nightingaledvs.com/article-submission/
All the best.
Sounds better than my suggestion!
“Nightingale pieces should, in general, be original to Nightingale. Sometimes we get submissions/pitches for content that originally appeared on a personal Medium, website, or blog, but we prefer to originate content in Nightingale.” from https://nightingaledvs.com/article-submission/
Roland:
I don’t think that linking to a pdf on a personal website, or for that matter on a preprint server such as Arxiv, would count as “content that originally appeared on a personal Medium, website, or blog.”
It’s standard for publications to require that submissions not to have been published before, but it’s also accepted that articles are circulated first as preprints.
The illustrated associations between the comics and the graphics were based on their visual similarities and the history of statistics. The analyses would have been more convincing if it mentioned some type of visual grammar linked to the history of science, e.g. periodization.
Ishmael:
Our article is just one contribution. You should feel free to write something yourself on periodization or whatever, building upon our ideas. That’s how the scholarly literature works.
Very interesting! Another curious confluence is the more recent webcomics (xkcd, smbc) where the cartoon sometimes is just a graph.
I’d be curious to know Randall Munroe’s opinion on this.
“As the saying goes, a picture plus a thousand words is better than two pictures or
two thousand words.”
I’ve never heard that saying! It’s pretty good. I’ve tried searching for it, with “a picture plus…” and “a picture and” and “a picture with”, and none of those turn up even a single hit on Google. Maybe this is just a saying that you and a few colleagues use? (That idea reminds me of “even camels get thirsty.”) If it is indeed a rare or uncommon saying, at least thus far, then I think that sentence would be much stronger without the initial comma clause.
As for where to submit the piece, which I like a lot…I have no suggestion.
Phil:
The saying is from me! See here: “A picture plus 1000 words is better than two pictures or 2000 words.”
P.S. Some more sayings are here and here.
There are several things that I say habitually but that doesn’t make them “sayings.” Get rid of “As the saying goes” and you will have a stronger opening line.
By the way, while looking for more information about Oresme I came across this book chapter https://www.dam.brown.edu/people/mumford/beyond/coursenotes/2006PartIb.pdf which I think is great, maybe you’ll like it too. There might even be something you want to add to your paper! (Going up the url a few layers takes you to this https://www.dam.brown.edu/people/mumford/ Check out the background photo. I was in Coimbra for a conference once; if I had known the university had a library that looks like that, I would have gone there just to look around).
Phil:
The article about Oresme is interesting. I don’t see that he did any graphs, beyond those in which x and y represent direct physical coordinates–so I’d connect that with the graphs used by astronomers when plotting trajectories. In that article it says that Oresme proposed graphs of other sorts; I just don’t see any examples in that article.
P.S. A couple of years ago we took a week-long vacation to Portugal, and we did stop in Coimbra to see the library. It was cool, although ultimately I don’t feel I got anything out of it except to say that I saw that really old library. If you’re in the town for some other reason anyway, though, yeah, the library is definitely worth a visit.
Thanks! I really liked the article, both for the interesting historical perspective, and most of all for the idea that comics may inform sequential use of graphs to convey developing ideas or analysis in different stages of a workflow.
Go back to the ASA and try CHANCE or SIGNIFICANCE.
You’ve primarily considered statistical journals, but maybe the paper might interest comics experts? A quick library search suggested that those scholars might read “ImageText”, “Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society”, or “The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship”. I don’t have a good sense of if those are good journals, but “ImageText” seems the most reputable from their respective webpages.
How about the “Bits and Bites” section of HDSR: https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/bits-and-bites
Example articles highlighting connections between data science and other fields:
Murder at Polling Manor: https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/ixq2bf38/release/1
Needs and Opportunities for Data in Wine: https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/ozztai78/release/1
I’m editor of Statistica (https://rivista-statistica.unibo.it/). Statistica is edited by the Stats department at the University of Bologna. It is an international journal with a wide scope, and it publishes papers from all areas of statistics. It is non-profit, open access and free for the authors. It also has a pretty good Impact Factor right now (although one can argue about how much that actually means, and how stable it will be).
I’d be very happy to have this kind of paper submitted.
Generally, anybody who reads this and wonders where to publish unconventional and interesting stuff is invited to submit to Statistica!
I don’t have any insight into where this (excellent) article should be published, but really appreciated reading it, and wanted to say thank you for writing it! When I teach data visualization, my intro lecture always talks about visualization as an exercise in intentional abstraction, and I use a panel from Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” to illustrate what I’m talking about. Next term I’ll be pointing to this article as evidence that I’m not crazy to have made the explicit link with cartooning!
Steven:
In that case, you might also enjoy my article, The ladder of abstraction in statistical graphics.
Oh nice, thank you for sharing that!
OK you were right, I did enjoy that! I assume you are aware of Bret Victor’s classic interactive essay, “Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction”, which digs into the same question; just in case you’re not, it would pair very well with your article: https://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/
You may also have encountered Nathan Yau’s book, “Data Points”; he gives a good and very concrete example of moving between levels of abstraction in an EDA context using a dataset of wedding photos.
Steven:
No, I hadn’t been aware of Bret Victor’s article. I guess the phrase “ladder of abstraction” is simple enough that different people can come up with it independently. Also, I hadn’t been familiar with that particular example from Yau, but I’ve seen lots of good stuff on his blog.