January 8, 2019 at 12:04 am
#807

Keymaster
Regarding the connection between case order in the table and order of categories: We regard these two things as conceptually distinct. Suppose, for example that you have census records of people, each with a marital status. We don’t say that the order of the records should determine the order in which ‘married,’ ‘divorced,’ ‘never married,’ etc should appear on a categorical axis. The default order is alphabetical, and the user can change that order manually.
But perhaps this brings up a research question: How do learners regard categorical values, and how do they come to understand the different ways they can be used in data visualization and analysis?