Clarification – Data Snooping and Tukey’s EDA

[ckimbrough]

In John Tukey’s book “EDA” (Exploratory Data Analysis) we learn to use descriptive visual devices such as “stem and leaf” plots, box plots, smoothing sequences, etc.

These things require a lot of rooting around in the data set, is EDA data snooping? Or is it only data snooping if you let what EDA reveals about the data guide you to a specific hypothesis?