From the RSS website: (rss.org.uk)
Mary Eleanor Spear (1897-1986) is credited for introducing the “range-bar” decades before John Tukey called it the “boxplot" and she had a long career as a government "Visual Information Specialist” in the United States before writing 2 major textbooks on data visualisation: Charting Statistics (1952) and Practical Charting Techniques (1969). In her first book, she even included tips about presenting data in graphic form on television and encouraged both readers and visualisation experts to properly think of the different aspects of a chart. In her own words “There is quite a difference between simply looking at a chart and seeing it.”
The data corresponds to yearly US supply of cotton from 1942 to 1948, including US consumption, exports, stocks and total supply. Here, will attempt to recreate the above plot:
And here are a few visualisations of my own:
