The Grammar of Graphics

This work focuses on rules for constructing graphs mathematically and then representing them as graphics aesthetically. It should be a useful book for programmers of computer graphics in the mathematical sciences.

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This book was written for statisticians, computer scientists, geographers, research and applied scientists, and others interested in visualizing data. It presents a unique foundation for producing almost every quantitative graphic found in scientific journals, newspapers, statistical packages, and data visualization systems. This foundation was designed for a distributed computing environment (Internet, Intranet, client-server), with special attention given to conserving computer code and system resources. While the tangible result of this work is a Java production graphics library (GPL) developed in collaboration with Dan Rope and Dan Carr, this book focuses on the deep structures involved in producing quantitative graphics from data. What are the rules that underly the production of pie charts, bar charts, scatterplots, function plots, maps, mosaics, radar charts? These rules are abstracted from the work of Bertin, Cleveland, Kosslyn, MacEachren, Pinker, Tufte, Tukey, Tobler, and other theorists of quantitative graphics.
Those less interested in the theoretical and mathematical foundations can still get a sense of the richness and structure of the system by examining the numerous and often unique color graphics it can produce. Leland Wilkinson is Senior VP, SYSTAT Products at SPSS Inc. and Adjunct Professor of Statistics at Northwestern University. He wrote the SYSTAT statistical package and founded SYSTAT Inc. in 1984. Wilkinson joined SPSS in a 1994 acquisition and now works on research and development of graphical applications for data mining and statistics. He is a Fellow of the ASA and an Associate Editor of The American Statistician. In addition to journal articles and the original SYSTAT computer program and manuals, Wilkinson is the author (with Grant Blank and Chris Gruber) of Desktop Data Analysis with SYSTAT.