BIO 542L: Graphic Publication for Biologists

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Making graphs

Important References:

• Graph Types in Biology
• Edward Tufte is a very opinionated and articulate statistician and graphic designer who has developed a cult following. His ideas are worth understanding even if you don’t follow them. Some of his books (links to Amazon.com):
  • The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
  • Envisioning Information
  • Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative
• SigmaPlot 8.0 for Windows - very expensive, very capable graphing software

Information

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a graph can easily be worth a million numbers. Even if it is only worth a dozen, it may present those numbers in a context that a paragraph or table could not. As Edward Tufte puts it, graphs help us to visualize quantity. Carefully designed graphs are among the most potent weapons in a scientist’s arsenal of persuasion.

In modern use, scientific graphs often look different from graphs in business and other fields, even when they are the same type of graph. Although very capable scientific graphing programs are available, most are much too expensive for student use. Microsoft Excel by default makes “business graphs”, but with a few changes, we can coax publication-quality scientific graphs out of the program.

Assignment

1. Using a computer program (Excel, another spreadsheet, SigmaPlot, or another graphing program), make two different graphs:
   • One must be a scatterplot, with at least ten data points. The other can be any kind of graph you choose.
   • The data can be real or made up, but the graph type should be appropriate to the type of data.
   • Both axes must be labeled, and major tick marks must be labeled. If there is more than one data series, the series must be either labeled or explained in a legend (e.g. “circles are experiment 1 and triangles are experiment 2”).
   • The graph must not have a title at the top (Excel puts one there automatically; you'll need to get rid of it).
   You should use good published examples as a guide and try to copy their appearance.
2. Prepare one graph (your choice) in the format for a thesis or publication: black-and-white only, labels of a size that fit with text.
3. Prepare the other graph in the format for a poster: color to mark data series, larger text for labels.
4. Turn in both graphs to your evaluator.