Anyone who’s seen one of my talks that even touches on data and visualisation will probably know how it like to use Anscombe’s Quartet as a demonstration of why it makes sense to look at data, as well as to illustrate the notion of a macroscope, albeit one applied to a case of N=all where all is small…
Some time ago I posted a small R demo – The Visual Difference – R and Anscombe’s Quartet. For the new OU course I’m working on (TM351 – “The Data Course”), our focus is on using IPython Notebooks. And as there’s a chunk in the course about dataviz, I feel more or less obliged to bring Anscombe’s Quartet in:-)
As we’re still finding our way about how to make use of IPython Notebooks as part of an online distance education course, I’m keen to collect feedback on some of the ways we’re considering using the notebooks.
The Anscombe’s Quartet notebook has quite a simple design – we’re essentially just using the cells as computed reveals – but I’m still be keen to hear any comments about how well folk think it might work as a piece of standalone teaching material, particularly in a distance education setting.
The notebook itself is on github (ou-tm351), along with sample data, and a preview of the unexecuted notebook can be viewed on nbviewer: Anscombe’s Quartet – IPython Notebook.
Just by the by, the notebook also demonstrates the use of pandas for reshaping the dataset (as well as linking out to a demonstration of how to reshape the data using OpenRefine) and the ŷhat ggplot python library (docs, code) for visualising the dataset.
Please feel free to post comments here or as issues on the github repo.
PS see also this technique for generating Same Stats, Different Graphs: Generating Datasets with Varied Appearance and Identical Statistics through Simulated Annealing.
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