Edward Tufte

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Edward Rolf Tufte (IPA /ˈtʌf.ti/) (born 1942 in Kansas City, Missouri to Virginia and Edward E. Tufte) is a professor emeritus of statistics, graphic design, and political economy at Yale University. He is also an expert in the presentation of informational graphics, such as infographics, charts, and graphs. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences. His work today centers on the field of information graphics.

Tufte currently resides in Cheshire, Connecticut. He periodically travels around the United States to offer one-day workshops on data presentation and information graphics.

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[edit] Achievements

Tufte's writing is important in such fields as information design and visual literacy, which deal with the visual communication of information. He coined the term "chartjunk" to refer to useless, non-informative, or information-obscuring elements of information displays. Tufte argues strongly against the inclusion of any decoration in visual presentations of information and claims that ink should only be used to convey significant data and aid in its interpretation.

[edit] Criticism of PowerPoint

Tufte became well-known by publishing his harsh criticism of Microsoft PowerPoint. In his essay The cognitive style of PowerPoint, Tufte criticizes many emergent properties of the software:

  • Its use to guide and reassure a presenter, rather than to enlighten the audience;
  • Unhelpfully simplistic tables and charts, resulting from the low resolution of computer displays;
  • The outliner causing ideas to be arranged in an unnecessarily deep hierarchy, itself subverted by the need to restate the hierarchy on each slide;
  • Enforcement of the audience's linear progression through that hierarchy (whereas with handouts, readers could browse and relate items at their leisure);
  • Poor typography and chart layout, from presenters who are poor designers and who use poorly designed templates and default settings;
  • Simplistic thinking, from ideas being squashed into bulleted lists, and stories with beginning, middle, and end being turned into a collection of disparate, loosely disguised points. This may present a kind of image of objectivity and neutrality that people associate with science, technology, and "bullet points".

Tufte's criticism of the use of PowerPoint has extended to its use by NASA engineers in the events leading to the Columbia disaster. Tufte's analysis of a representative NASA Powerpoint slide is included in a full page sidebar entitled "Engineering by Viewgraphs" [1] in Volume 1 of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's report .

[edit] Sparkline

Sparklines
U.S. stock market activity (February 7, 2006)
Index Day Value Change
Dow Jones Image:Sparkline dowjones.svg 10765.45 −32.82 (−0.30%)
S&P 500 Image:Sparkline sp500.svg 1256.92 −8.10 (−0.64%)
Nasdaq Image:Sparkline nasdaq.svg 2244.83 −13.97 (−0.62%)

Tufte also developed sparklines — a simple, condensed way to present trends and variation, associated with a measurement such as average temperature or stock market activity. These are often used as elements of a small multiple with several lines used together.

[edit] Bibliography

Tufte's Yale PhD thesis was The civil rights movement and its opposition (1968).

Early in his career, Tufte wrote several books about using statistics to analyze political issues:

The following books, all published by Tufte's own Graphics Press, make up the core of Tufte's work, documenting how to best display different forms of information with copious examples and commentary:

[edit] External links

Preceded by
John Chapline
ACM SIGDOC Rigo Award
1992
Succeeded by
Jay Bolter
In other languages