Michael Friendly
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Michael Lewis Friendly (born 1945) is a Professor of Psychology at York University in Ontario, Canada, and an Associate Coordinator with the Statistical Consulting Service.

Biography

Michael Friendly received his PhD in 1972 in psychometrics and cognitive psychology from Princeton University's Department of Psychology.^[1] where he held a Psychometric Fellowship awarded by the Educational Testing Service.

He is Professor of Psychology at York University, Canada, and has been associate coordinator and director of the Statistical Consulting Service since 1985.

He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics.

Work

Friendly is an expert in the field of statistics, graphics, and macro writing, and has experience with conceptualization, research, and writing of this invaluable text. He has taught graduate-level courses in Multivariate Data Analysis and Computer Methods in Psychology using SAS software for over 25 years.

His research interests has developed from generally apply quantitative and computer methods to problems in cognitive psychology, including the cognitive aspects of extracting information from graphical displays^[2] in 1991 to the history of statistics and data visualization; graphical methods for data and information visualization in 2008^[3]

Varieties of visualization

Michael Friendly has made an analysis of the different kinds of visualization terms.^[4] According to Friendly in 2008 Information visualization is the broadest term that could be taken to subsume all the developments in visualization. Almost anything, if sufficiently organized, is information of a sort: Tables, graphs, maps and even text, whether static or dynamic, provide some means to see what lies within, determine the answer to a question, find relations, and perhaps apprehend things which could not be seen so readily in other forms. In this sense, information visualization takes us back to the earliest scratches of forms on rocks, to the development of pictoria as mnemonic devices in illuminated manuscripts, and to the earliest use of diagrams in the history of science and mathematics.^[4]

However, today specific visualization tersm have become specific meaning.

• Information visualization is generally applied to the visual representation of large-scale collections of non-numerical information, such as files and lines of code in software systems, library and bibliographic databases, networks of relations on the internet, and so forth.^[4]
• Scientific visualization is another present field, primarily concerned with the visualization of 3-D+ phenomena (architectural, meterological, medical, biological, etc.), where the emphasis is on realistic renderings of volumes, surfaces, illumination sources, and so forth, perhaps with a dynamic (time) component.^[4]
• Data visualization is the science of visual representation of “data”, defined as information which has been abstracted in some schematic form, including attributes or variables for the units of information. This topic could be taken to subsume the two main focii: statistical graphics, and thematic cartography.^[4]
• Cartographic visualization is primarily concerned with representation constrained to a spatial domain; statistical graphics applies to any domain in which graphical methods are employed in the service of statistical analysis.^[4]

See also

• Charles Joseph Minard
• GGobi
• Information visualization
• Scientific visualization
• Visualization

Publications

Friendly is the author of four books and numerous research papers. Books:

• 1988. Advanced Logo: A Language for Learning. Hillsdale, N.J. : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• 1991. SAS System for Statistical Graphics. Medium: Paperback.
• 2000. Visualizing Categorical Data. Cary, NC: SAS Institute.
• 2006. Visual statistics : seeing data with dynamic interactive graphics. With Forrest W. Young and Pedro M. Valero-Mora. Hoboken, N.J. : Wiley-Interscience.

Articles, reports, papers. A selection:

• 1991. "Interpreting higher order interactions in loglinear analysis: A picture is worth 1000 words". With John Fox. Tech. rep., Institute for Social Research, York University, Toronto, CA.
• 1992. "Graphical methods for categorical data". In: Proceedings of the SAS User's Group International Conference, 17:1367-1373.
• 1994. "A fourfold display for 2 by 2 by K tables". Tech. Rep. 217, York University, Psychology Dept. URL
• 1994. "Mosaic displays for multi-way contingency tables". In: Journal of the American Statistical Association;;, 89:190-200.
• 2000. "A brief history of the mosaic display. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics". 11(1):89-107. URL
• 2000. "The roots and branches of statistical graphics". With Dan Denis. In: Journal de la Société Française de Statistique, 141(4):51-60. (published in 2001).
• 2007. "A brief history of data visualization". In: C. Chen, Wolfgang Härdle and Antony Unwin, eds., Handbook of Computational Statistics: Data Visualization, vol. III, chap. 1, pp. 1-34. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.
• 2007. "Visualizing nature and society". With Gilles Palsky. In: James R. Ackerman and Robert W. Karrow, eds., Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, pp. 205-251. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• 2008. "Milestones in the history of thematic cartography, statistical graphics, and data visualization".

References

External links

• Michael Friendly's Home Page.
• Milestones in the History of Thematic Cartography, Statistical Graphics, and Data Visualization: An illustrated chronology of innovations by Michael Friendly and Daniel J. Denis.
• The Past, Present and Future of Statistical Graphics a 2004 presentation by Michael Friendly on VIEWS, London, Nov, 2004.