Talk:1945: Scientific Paper Graph Quality

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Revision as of 02:21, 23 January 2018 by 172.68.34.28 (talk)
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What happened circa 2015 that marks the *end* of the PowerPoint/MSPaint era? 108.162.238.59 16:22, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

--> More and more journals explicitly forbade the use of powerpoint. Also, more scientists are familiar with software better suited for creating scientific graphs. Thawn (talk) 16:34, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

The problem was never that it was impossible to good quality graphs with those tools. The problem was that people didn't actually do so, in part because the tools made it really easy to produce something superficially good but actually so information-free as to be utterly bad, as well as making it rather more difficult than one would hope for to make camera-ready graphs (journals having higher-resolution print reproduction than most computer screens of the time). But before anyone gets fancy about this, you could commit very similar sins with other tools; merely using a specialist plotting program doesn't automatically make the output truly comprehensible (or relevant). 141.101.104.107 22:30, 22 January 2018 (UTC)
If, however, creating graph is harder, you are likely to focus on what to put into them and make them only if it makes sense. One reason for decreased quality of graph might be that there was more of them for same amount of data. -- Hkmaly (talk) 01:29, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

An interesting thing to note is that you can see from this chart that even slightly before the paint/powerpoint era the quality started going down. But it could be because this graph is meant to be just like the point it is making and therefore is not 100% accurate. 108.162.219.76 17:47, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

You might find http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/ amusing. It is the Gettysburg Address done as a PowerPoint presentation. 108.162.216.154 18:55, 22 January 2018 (UTC) Gene Wirchenko [email protected]

Does anyone have good examples of papers showing this? It would really help the explanation...172.68.211.166

Also amusing is how low quality the image of this comic is. It is only 360*240 pixels, which is fitting for a graph describing low quality graphs.172.68.34.28 02:21, 23 January 2018 (UTC)