Graphical Perception

Cleveland, W. S., & McGill, R. (1984). Graphical Perception: Theory, Experimentation, and Application to the Development of Graphical Methods. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 79(387), 531-554.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1984

Volume

79

Issue

387

Pages

531-554

DOI

10.1080/01621459.1984.10478080

DOI registrant

Taylor & Francis

Link

https://doi.org/10.1080/01621459.1984.10478080

Cited from

communication_media_studies

Cited by

4 citations across 4 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Representational Modality
  • The same data, different modalities, different stories.

    This sourceEmpirical ranking of graphical encodings (position, length, angle, area, color) by perceptual accuracy; shows how chart-type choice (map vs. bar vs. time series) determines what patterns viewers extract from identical data.

    Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract

    The abstract backs the general point that the encoding form governs how viewers decode the same quantitative information, but it does not state that different modalities yield different 'stories'.

    “The theory provides a guideline for graph construction: Graphs should employ elementary tasks as high in the ordering as possible. This principle is applied to a variety of graphs, including bar charts, divided bar charts, pie charts, and statistical maps with shading. The conclusion is that radical surgery on these popular graphs is needed, and as replacements we offer alternative graphical forms—dot charts, dot …”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

Domain-specific

• Bubble Chart
  • Optional colour, stroke, shape, facet, or label channels may encode categories or further variables, but they are additions rather than part of the minimal identity.

    This sourceFoundational primary work distinguishing quantitative judgments by position, length, angle, area, volume, and other visual tasks.

• Graphical perception
  • Their ranking is an influential result about graphical perception, not the whole identity.
• Waterfall Chart
  • Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.

Verification

Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.

Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 1 of 4 citations: 1 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.

Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.

See how references were verified.

Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 1 other way.

• https://www.statsclass.org/dsci310/Notes/Cleveland_McGill_EPT.pdf ×1

Registry ID ref:0acdf16aac31 · see in the full table