lies, damned lies and web stats

We'll shortly be pointing to studies about the abuse of internet statistics, in particularly demographic projections and conflicting reports about particular markets (where figures from different vendors frequently diverge by over a thousand %).  

     Primers

Darrell Huff's How To Lie With Statistics (New York, Norton 93) hasn't been substantially updated since its first appearance in the early 1950s but remains a classic. John Paulos' A Mathematician Reads The Newspaper (New York, Anchor 96) is a similarly lighthearted look at the use and abuse of mathematics in the mass and specialist media.

Joel Best's Damned Lies & Statistics: Untangling Numbers From The Media, Politicians & Activists (Berkeley, Uni of California Press 01) is harder going but perhaps more valuable.

The Design guide on this site points to some of the more valuable studies about the interpretation and creation of statistical graphics. Three of particular note are Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (92), Envisioning Information (90) and Visual Explanations: Images & Quantities, Evidence & Narrative (97) - all published by Graphics Press (Cheshire, Connecticut).

For an overview of data collection and interpreation issues we recommend Andrew Odlyzko'svaluable 2000 paper on Internet Growth: Myth & Reality, Use & Abuse and Michael Dahn's paper Counting Angels on a Pinhead: Critically Interpreting Web Size Estimates.

     sectoral studies and standards

The US White Paper on Electronic Journal Statistics (Luther), reflecting the 1998 International Coalition of Library Consortia 1998 Guidelines for Statistical Measures of Usage of Web-Based Indexed, Abstracted & Full Text Resources (ICOLC), deals with library statistics.

The Australian Internet Industry Association (IIA) is encouraging development of a set of standard measures for the local online industry, including to agreed standards for "Site Centric/Rating, and Ad Server Measurement". The University of Southen California has published a paper (PDF) mapping competing US industry measures. It should be read in conjunction with the outstanding paper by Thomas Novak & Donna Hoffman on New Metrics for New Media Toward the Development of Web Measurement Standards.

     DIY

Robert Orenstein's 'Irresponsible Internet Statistics Generator (IISG) retains its value for those trying to make sense of some of the loopier government, academic and business projections.



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