  A central concept in information visualization research and practice is the
notion of visual variable effectiveness, or the perceptual precision at which
values are decoded given visual channels of encoding. Formative work from
Cleveland & McGill has shown that position along a common axis is the most
effective visual variable for comparing individual values. One natural
conclusion is that any chart that is not a dot plot or scatterplot is deficient
and should be avoided. In this paper we refute a caricature of this
"scatterplots only" argument as a way to call for new perspectives on how
information visualization is researched, taught, and evaluated.
