167 | Visualization and Statistics with Andrew Gelman and Jessica Hullman

Data Stories

In this new episode, we talk about the interplay between statistics and data visualization. We do that with Andrew Gelman, Professor of Statistics and Political Science at Columbia University, and Jessica Hullman, Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University. Andrew started the popular blog “Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science,” which has an active community of readers and has been around for many years. Jessica started contributing lately with many exciting posts, several of which have to do with data visualization. In the episode, we touch upon many topics, including the story behind the blog, the role of surprises, anomalies, and storytelling in science, the Anscombe’s quartet, and exploratory data analysis.

Links

• Jessica Hullman: http://users.eecs.northwestern.edu/~jhullman/
• Andrew Gelman: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/
• Blog: Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/
• Andrew’s 2003 paper on visualization as model checks: “Exploratory Data Analysis for Complex Models”
• Jessica and Andrew’s follow-up article expanding on the idea of model checks for visualization research: “Designing for Interactive Exploratory Data Analysis Requires Theories of Graphical Inference”
• Andrew and Thomas’ paper on stories in social sciences: “When Do Stories Work? Evidence and Illustration in the Social Sciences”

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Related episodes

• Big Data Skepticism w/ Kate Crawford
• Science Communication at SciAm w/ Jen Christiansen
• Statistical Numbing with Paul Slovic
• Machine Bias with Jeff Larson
• Calling Bullshit with Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West
• Data Science and Visualization with David Robinson

Chapters

1. Our podcast is listener-supported, please consider making a donation! (00:01:03)

https://www.patreon.com/datastories

2. Our guests: Jessica Hullman and Andrew Gelman (00:01:30)

3. Blog: Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science (00:02:19)

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/

4. Style as organizing principle (00:05:19)

5. Should scientists tell a story? (00:11:00)

6. Paper: How do we learn from stories? (00:18:55)

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/storytelling.pdf

7. How open are we really towards anomalies and changing our mind? (00:22:33)

8. Methodological attribution error (00:23:53)

9. The dance between the surprise in the particular and surfacing the signal (00:27:16)

10. "Anscombe's quartet" (00:35:11)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet

11. "You draw it first" (00:38:48)

12. Get in touch with us and support us on Patreon (00:47:52)

https://www.patreon.com/datastories