Abstractions in data viz

Happy to report that another paper of mine has just appeared. This paper is primarily Andrew Gelman's work, for which I applied some finishing touches. The paper is called "The Ladder of Abstraction in Statistical Graphics" (American Scientist). It concerns a topic that is under-researched. How should we compose a visual story that utilizes a sequence of charts? This goal differs from the objective of how we compose a single chart that tells the entire story.Like many, I appreciate single charts that tell the whole story. Minard's illustration of Napoleon's Russian campaign is a famous example. Constructing such a chart forces the designer to distill a lot of information to their essence. It forces the designer to edit.But when the problem is complex enough, a single chart cannot do full justice. Take this common situation: you have a finding about metric A's correlation with some variable. Metric A is not directly measured but an output of a complicated process. The chart's reader…