Posted by Kelsie Ferin
In Wilkinson’s chapter “The Grammar of Graphics”, he discusses what is exactly involved in GOG. The seven orthogonal components that make up GOG are variables, algebra, scales, statistics, geometry, coordinates, and aesthetics. Some of the purposes of GOG are 1) to develop statistical graphics systems that are powerful and flexible, 2) to help understand the steps that are used when generating charts and graphs, 3) develop intelligent systems that can a) graph data without human specification and b) read already published statistical graphics to recover data and interpret relationships, and 4) define problems that will help ordinary people and statisticians understand graphics systems. One challenge of using GOG is that by having the components of GOG be orthogonal, there are some consequences that come with this. For instance, this comes with a high degree of expressiveness and this means that this system can produce a large variety of graphical forms. This is a challenge because not only can you get the charts you are expecting to see, but you could also get charts that are “undiscovered”, as Wilkinson said. We have used grammar graphics in this class. For example, we used the R package ggplot in order to produce these graphs to display our data.