Posted inStatistics

Were the cannonballs on or off the road first?

There’s something of a controversy whether photographer Roger Fenton placed cannon balls in a road and then took pictures of them. He also took a picture of the same road cleared of cannon balls. Apparently, there is a question whether the cannon balls were ON the road when he got there, or possibly they were OFF and he placed them there to get a more dramatic photo. This drama unfolds at Errol Morris’s New York Times blog.

Whether they were first ON or OFF (Morris uses the capitals letters, so I will, too), excited considerable interest, with hundreds of people commenting one way or the other, each commenter offering some evidence to support his position.

Some people used the number (Morris uses the ‘#’ symbol) and position of the balls, others argued sun shadows, some had some words about gravity, and so on. Morris compiled the evidence used by both sides, ON (cannon balls on first) and OFF (cannon balls placed there by Fenton), and he presented this summary picture (go to his blog to see the full-sized image):

Morris cannonball evidence pic

This is an awful graph: the order of evidence types is arbitrary, it would have been better to list them in order of importance; the use of color is overwhelming and difficult to follow; and, worst of all, the two graphs are on an absolute scale. 288 people supported ON, and 153 OFF, so counting the absolute numbers and comparing them, as this picture does, is not fair. Of course the ON side, with almost twice as many people, will have higher counts in most of the bins. What’s needed is a percentage comparison.