This is my series on how to teach statistics with the help of cartoons. I want to share my fun, but there are too many for just one blog post, therefore I created a series. On to implementation numero 2: Cartoons on Data

Data

http://phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1816

I already used this one as an intro to the blogpost Data what data?

“Then you have bigger problems than grammar”. Shows the typical trend of worrying on things that are of minor importance than what you should be writing. This is a recurring topic in Jorge Chams PHDcomics (p.h.d. meaning “piled higher and deeper” in this context)… 😉

https://xkcd.com/1429/

Nice companion piece to Jorge Chams explanation on “data”.

And Star Trek! 😀

Not sure what to do with it? Have a look here: http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1429:_Data

http://www.slane.co.nz

This one is by Chris Slane. It’s quite often cited in relation to privacy rights and data protection and he has loads of other cartoons with this topic on his website. Check it out!

I interprete it as an example of bad research strategy…

https://xkcd.com/1138/

Here we have a good example of data collection problems, which can be transferred to archaeology quite easily by thinking “researched areas” for the cities in Randall’s example and “not well researched areas” for the countryside. I’m not teaching geostatistics at the moment, but yeah, this’d be perfect for such a course.

Explanation here: http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1138:_Heatmap

Sophie Schmidt

Founder & Editor

About the Author

My name is Sophie, I am a prehistoric and computational archaeologist and have been research associate at the Universities of Bonn and Cologne, as well as for the NFDI4Objects project at the German Archaeological Institute. I teach statistics for archaeologists, work on new methods in settlement archaeology (GIS, geostatistics in R and stuff) and am interested in archaeogaming. Now I started my PhD-project on the 5th mill. BC in Brandenburg (that's North-East Germany).

View Articles