Data visualization: a reading list

Here is a collection of books and peer-reviewed articles on data visualization. There is a lot of good material on the philosophy, principles and practices of data visualization.

I plan to update the list with additional material in the future (see the current version as a draft). Do reach out if you have any recommendations.

Introduction

– Graphs in Statistical Analysis (Anscombe 1973)
– An Economist’s Guide to Visualizing Data (Schwabish 2014)
– Data Visualization in Sociology (Healy and Moody 2014)
– Beyond Bar and Line Graphs: Time for a New Data Presentation Paradigm (Weissgerber et al. 2015)
– Graphical Perception: Theory, Experimentation, and Application to the Development of Graphical Methods (Cleveland and McGill 1984)
– Graphic Display of Data (Wilkinson 2012)
– Visualizing Data in Political Science (Traunmüller 2020)
– Better Data Visualizations: A Guide for Scholars, Researchers, and Wonks (Schwabish 2021)

History

– Historical Development of the Graphical Representation of Statistical Data (Funkhouser 1937)
– Quantitative Graphics in Statistics: A Brief History (Beniger and Robyn 1978)

Tips and recommendations

– Ten Simple Rules for Better Figures (Rougier et al. 2014)
– Designing Graphs for Decision-Makers (Zacks and Franconeri 2020)
– Designing Effective Graphs (Frees and Miller 1998)
– Fundamental Statistical Concepts in Presenting Data: Principles for Constructing Better Graphics (Donahue 2011)
– Designing Better Graphs by Including Distributional Information and Integrating Words, Numbers, and Images (Lane and Sándor 2009)

Analysis and decision making

– Statistical inference for exploratory data analysis and model diagnostics (Buja et al. 2009)
– Statistics and Decisions: The Importance of Communication and the Power of Graphical Presentation (Mahon 1977)
– The Eight Steps of Data Analysis: A Graphical Framework to Promote Sound Statistical Analysis (Fife 2020)

Uncertainty

– Researchers Misunderstand Confidence Intervals and Standard Error Bars (Belia et al. 2005)
– Error bars in experimental biology (Cumming et al. 2007)
– Confidence Intervals and the Within-the-Bar Bias (Pentoney and Berger 2016)
– Depicting Error (Wainer 1996)
– When (ish) is My Bus?: User-centered Visualizations of Uncertainty in Everyday, Mobile Predictive Systems (Kay et al. 2016)
– Decisions With Uncertainty: The Glass Half Full (Joslyn and LeClerc 2013)
– Uncertainty Visualization (Padilla et al. 2020)
– A Probabilistic Grammar of Graphics (Pu and Kay 2020)

Tables

– Let’s Practice What We Preach: Turning Tables into Graphs (Gelman et al. 2002)
– Why Tables Are Really Much Better Than Graphs (Gelman 2011)
– Graphs or Tables (Ehrenberg 1978)
– Using Graphs Instead of Tables in Political Science (Kastellec and Leoni 2007)
– Ten Guidelines for Better Tables (Schwabish 2020)

Deciding on a chart

– Graph and chart aesthetics for experts and laymen in design: The role of familiarity and perceived ease of use (Quispel et al. 2016)

Chart types

Boxplots

– 40 years of boxplots (Wickham and Stryjewski 2011)

Pie charts

– No Humble Pie: The Origins and Usage of a Statistical Chart (Spence 2005)

Infographics

– Infovis and Statistical Graphics: Different Goals, Different Looks (Gelman and Unwin 2013)
– InfoVis Is So Much More: A Comment on Gelman and Unwin and an Invitation to Consider the Opportunities (Kosara 2013)
– InfoVis and Statistical Graphics: Comment (Murrell 2013)
– Graphical Criticism: Some Historical Notes (Wickham 2013)
– Tradeoffs in Information Graphics (Gelman and Unwin 2013)

Maps

– Visualizing uncertainty in areal data with bivariate choropleth maps, map pixelation and glyph rotation (Lucchesi and Wikle 2017)

Scatterplot

– The Many Faces of a Scatterplot (Cleveland and McGill 1984)
– The early origins and development of the scatterplot (Friendly and Denis 2005)

Dot plots

– Dot Plots: A Useful Alternative to Bar Charts (Robbins 2006)

3D charts

– The Pseudo Third Dimension (Haemer 1951)

Teaching pedagogy

– Correlational Analysis and Interpretation: Graphs Prevent Gaffes (Peden 2001)
– Numbers, Pictures, and Politics: Teaching Research Methods Through Data Visualizations (Rom 2015)
– Data Analysis and Data Visualization as Active Learning in Political Science (Henshaw and Meinke 2018)

Software

Excel

– Effective Data Visualization: The Right Chart for the Right Data (Evergreen 2016)

R

– Data Visualization (Healy 2018)
– Data Visualization with R (Kabacoff 2018)
– ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis (Wickham 2009)
– Fundamentals of Data Visualization (Wilke 2019)
– R Graphics Cookbook (Chang 2020)

Stata

– A Visual Guide to Stata Graphics (Mitchell 2012)