Review: The Manga Guide to Statistics

The other day I saw a girl wearing a shirt with the slogan "Will yuri for yaoi," and I thought, hey, wouldn't it be funnier if it were a boy wearing the same shirt, just to get the extra level of non sequitur value? As for No Starch Press, they sent me a free review copy of The Manga Guide to Statistics, and it's close enough to the kinds of topics I cover that I figured it'd be worth writing a review.

I'm not entirely clear on the provenance of this book. It's credited to a Japanese author and there are a bunch of Japanese names and a Japanese university mentioned in the acknowledgements, so I think it's some kind of translation or adaptation of a Japanese original. There are some stylistic clues pointing in that direction in the text, too; stuff that reads more like translated Japanese than natively-written English. But it's printed with English-language page and panel ordering, and they didn't just mirror the original art because there's right-way-round Japanese writing in a lot of the panels. My best guess is that they did a fair bit of layout work to rearrange the panels into English-language ordering. That may or may not be a good thing. It's not what English-speaking manga fans prefer and expect (we generally want just the bare minimum of translation to make it readable) but I imagine the publishers may have wanted to reach a bigger readership, i.e. English-speaking statistics students who aren't manga fans. Having to read the book "backwards" could well be a deal-breaker for such readers.

The book is structured into seven chapters or lessons, each of which starts as a chapter of manga about a girl who's studying statistics in order to get close to a man she has a crush on, but it usually breaks into a more textbook-style presentation of flat text and equations as it gets into the technical content. There's an appendix at the back that guides the reader through duplicating the calculation examples in Microsoft Excel.

The artwork is in a simple, classic manga style. My first impression was negative - I compared it to other manga on my shelf and noticed that this book's backgrounds are simple, often omitted, and the shading leans heavily on screen tones, with a flat two-dimensional effect - but on reading the whole thing I think I like it a lot better now than I did at first. "Clean" may be a more accurate descriptor than "simple": there's been a lot of attention paid to camera angles, and the backgrounds do get more detailed when it's appropriate to the visual rhetoric. Also, the girl and her outfits are very cute.

I have some doubts about the statistics content. The selection of topics covered is kind of weird. It covers some basic topics, and then it covers some more advanced topics, while omitting others in between that I think are more useful and interesting. I feel like I'm reading seven chapters selected uniformly from a book that originally had about 40 chapters. This effect may partly come from differences between Japanese and Western teaching styles: I suspect that in Japanese school books there may be more expectation for the reader to hang on every word and learn it all Just Because Teacher Said So rather than for any application. Then the book only has to mention something once, offhandedly, and can safely expect the reader to have officially Learned it.

For instance, there's a lengthy exposition on how to look up numbers in normal and chi-squared distribution tables a couple chapters before any real reason is given for why you would want to. It kind of comes together in the last chapter because you use the chi-squared distribution for the Cramer's coefficient hypothesis test... but that's the only hypothesis test they present, and it's certainly not the one I'd choose if I had to pick just one to present, nor the first if I were presenting several. Things like what the significance level really means, and the question of whether a normal distribution is or isn't a good model of a population, go by very fast.

Because of that kind of thing, I don't think I can recommend this book as a way to learn statistics for people who don't already know statistics and are accustomed to Western teaching methods. It's no substitute for a non-manga statistics textbook; there are just too many large gaps. It might be good for some other kinds of readers, though. Someone who is studying statistics from a regular textbook might like to have a different angle on the topics covered. It might also serve as an advertisement for the general subject of statistics, to a manga fan who might not have previously thought of stats as an interesting subject. Or, I suppose, one could apply it in the opposite direction - give it to a nerd who already knows stats but has never seen manga before, to convince them that Japanese comic books can be fun too!