InfoVis Is So Much More: A Comment on Gelman and Unwin and an Invitation to Consider the Opportunities

I welcome the opportunity to respond to Andrew Gelman and Antony Unwin’s article, Infovis and Statistical Graphics: Different Goals, Different Looks. Their view of information visualization (InfoVis) is very distorted, but unfortunately not uncommon. In the following, I will try to give readers a sense of what InfoVis is really about, show some recent contributions, list some challenges, and show that there is a lot of opportunity for collaboration between InfoVis and statistics. Gelman and Unwin base their selection of work on the blog Flowing Data, run by Nathan Yau. While Yau has a large number of readers, his blog does not represent the state of the art in InfoVis research. He tends to focus on communication-oriented and artistic pieces, and rarely delves into the depth of data analysis using visualization on the blog itself. He does some of that in the paid members-only section, as well as in his book Yau (2011). Yau’s focus clearly colors Gelman and Unwin’s perception of visualization and is the basis for their claim that, “[on] the infovis side, computer scientists and designers are interested in grabbing the readers’ attention and telling them a story.” This is, quite simply, not true.