RolfAndreassen comments on Open Thread, September 30 - October 6, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Don't have a formal source, but I can give you a quick rundown of the advice my group ends up giving to every student we work with:
Here's a few reason not to do that. (Not to mention the possibility of colour-blind viewers.)
Thanks for the link. I recommend reading it to anyone who's interested in how data gets (mis)represented.
Well, you have to admit it's still a big improvement over the old ROOT default. :)
Well, the old default does make local variations more visible, especially for the colour-blind. OTOH I agree that telling at a glance which of two widely separated spots on the graph has a higher value is all but outright impossible with it.
How do I know that they are big enough?
When the seventy-year-old at the back of the large auditorium with the cheap, ancient projector can read them. Alternatively, when your boss stops complaining. Lines are too thick if they overlap; dots are too big when you can't easily tell the difference between high and medium density. (And if this happens at the default dot size, switch to a colour scale.)
If you're doing PowerPoint or similar presentation tools, you want your axis labels to be the same size as your bullet-point text. One trick I sometimes use is to whiteout the axis labels in the image file of my plot, and put them back in using the same text tool that's creating my bullets.
How many of those suggestions could be replaced by "use ggplot2"?
Within our group, none, because then we'd have to learn R. For ChristianKI, quite possibly all of them.