Telling Stories with Data: With Applications in R
Piotr Fryźlewicz · The American Statistician · 2024
W. Edwards Deming once famously said "Without data, you're just another person with an opinion".Of course, having an opinion does not have to stop with the arrival of data, and it is the job of a data scientist to have an opinion about best practices in the field.Dr Alexander's book aims to position itself as a vade mecum of modern social data science, but it is also an opinion piece about it -about what it is, and about how to do it in a certain standardised way in the context of the social sciences.I emphasise opinion here, because it is not something that readers coming to data science from many other fields will necessarily be used to seeing in their sources.Readers with a mathematics or statistics background will be used to books presenting truths rooted in certain paradigms or based on certain assumptions.There is typically little to disagree with in these sorts of works.Readers with a computer science background may be used to manuals, describing tools or advising how to achieve certain effects.Again, there is usually not much to disagree with in a manual.By contrast, opinion pieces, whether good or bad, will invariably divide opinion, and this may be particularly easy for a volume as massive and as broadly pitched as "Telling Stories with Data".Its