Recommend a review article about Data Visualization in Sociology https://www.annualreviews.org/conten...-071312-145551 There's some interesting observation in it.
Given the power of statistical visualization, then, it is puzzling that quantitative sociology is so often practiced without visual referents. One need only compare a recent issue of the American Sociological Review or the American Journal of Sociology to Science, Nature, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science to see the radical difference in visual acuity. It is common for the premier journals in sociology to publish articles with many tables, but no figures. The opposite is true in the premier natural science journals. There, a key figure is often the heart of the article. In Nature, for example, the online table of contents includes a thumbnail of the central figure to serve as the link to the rest of the paper.
A common complaint about Tufte's work is that there are so few direct instructions. Busy cooks want a cookbook, not a picture of a fantastic meal. The tendency for the codification of data visualization to vacillate between overly abstract maxims and overly specific examples is characteristic of any craft where a practical sense of how to proceed—a taste or feeling for the right choice—matters for successful execution. A long-standing and plausible response to the problem is to have the designer make many of the judicious choices in advance and then embed them for users in the default settings of graphics applications. Given that graphical software aimed at regular users has been around for several decades now, however, these efforts have proven less successful than initially hoped. In the foreword to the new edition of Semiology of Graphics, Howard Wainer (2010, p. xi) reflects on the hope he and others once felt that easy-to-use graphical tools and software would lead to better general practice by way of smarter defaults. But, he argues, this has not happened. In the end, high quality graphical presentation requires crafting a deliberately designed message rather than accepting the pre-established setting. Recent theoretical work explicitly recognizes the limits of relying on defaults.
To many working statisticians, infographics are the descendants of Tufte's Ducks—those “self-promoting graphics” where “the overall design purveys Graphical Style rather than quantitative information” (Tufte 1983, p. 116). The contemporary infographic in its pure form is a supercharged megaduck incorporating not only the bells and whistles derided by Tufte but far more besides, such as a spurious quasi-narrative structure, pictographic sequencing, or excessive dynamic elements. Gelman & Unwin (2013) discuss Infovis-style work from a statistical point of view. They argue that most infographics do not meet the standards normally demanded of statistical visualizations, but they concede that sometimes the goals of the latter are not those of the former.
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