How do you make sense of this? As you might expect, the first step is to make a table. But you don’t want to treat each number as its own category, because that would produce a really uninteresting graph. Instead you create categories, except for numeric data you call them classes. The rules for classes are very simple:
The classes must cover all the data points.
They must all be the same width.
There must be no gaps between classes.
Notice that the rules don’t tell you how many classes there must be, or what width a class must have. That’s where your discretion comes in. You want to pick class boundaries that are “nice” numbers, and you don’t want too many classes or too few. In practice, five to nine classes is usually about the right number.
How does that apply to the iTunes songs? Take a look at the data. The lowest number seems to be 113, and the highest is 837. That gives a range in “nice” numbers of about 100–850. If you set class width to 100 you have eight classes, so that seems about right.
Now go ahead and make your tally marks to create the table. Instead of category names, you use class boundaries. You already know how to make tally marks, so I’ll just give you the results: