Edward Tufte

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Edward Rolf Tufte
Born: 1942
Kansas City, Missouri
Occupation: professor, statistician
Nationality: American

Edward Rolf Tufte (IPA /ˈtʌf.ti/) (born 1942 in Kansas City, Missouri to Virginia and Edward E. Tufte), a professor emeritus of statistics, graphic design, and political economy at Yale University has been described by The New York Times as "the Leonardo da Vinci of Data". He is an expert in the presentation of informational graphics such as charts and diagrams, and is a fellow of the American Statistical Association. Tufte has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences.

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

Contents

[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 quantitative information displays. Tufte argues strongly against the inclusion of any non-informative decoration in visual presentations of quantitative information and claims that ink should only be used to convey significant data and aid in its interpretation. In chapter 2 of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Tufte states:

“ Sometimes decorations can help editorialize about the substance of the graphic. But it's wrong to distort the data measures—the ink locating values of numbers—in order to make an editorial comment or fit a decorative scheme. ”

[edit] Criticism of PowerPoint

Tufte has criticized the way Microsoft PowerPoint is typically used. 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 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:

  • Dahl, Robert; Edward R. Tufte (1973). Size & Democracy. Stanford University Press. ISBN 0804708347. 
  • Tufte, Edward R. (1974-08-05). Data Analysis for Politics and Policy. Prentice Hall College Div. ISBN 0131975250. 
    • Tufte notes on his website that a second edition of this book is likely.
  • Tufte, Edward R. (1978). Political Control of the Economy. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691075948. 

The core of Tufte's work documents how to best display different forms of information with copious examples and commentary:

  • Tufte, Edward R. [1983] (2001). The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd Edition, Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. ISBN 0961392142. 
  • Tufte, Edward R. (1990). Envisioning Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. ISBN 0961392118. 
  • Tufte, Edward R. (1997). Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. ISBN 0961392126. 
    • Chapter 2 is also published as Tufte, Edward R. (1997). Visual & Statistical Thinking: Displays of Evidence for Decision Making. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. ISBN 0961392134.  It contains extensive analysis of Dr John Snow's intervention into the cholera epidemic in London in 1854 and into the Challenger disaster of 1986.
  • Tufte, Edward R. (2003). "PowerPoint is evil". Wired 11 (9). ISSN 1059-1028. 
  • Tufte, Edward R. [2003] (2006). The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, 2nd Edition, Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. ISBN 0961392169. 
  • Tufte, Edward R. (2006). Beautiful Evidence. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. ISBN 0961392177. 


[edit] External links

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