Pseudo-book review: Edward Tufte

(from ‘The Visual Display of Quantitative Information’, Edward Tufte)

Perhaps best known in some circles for his scathing critique of Microsoft Powerpoint, Edward Tufte is the Leonardo da Vinci of data, as the New York Times put it, and his self-published books (the newly released Beautiful Evidence or the all-time classic The Visual Display of Quantitative Information) are quite elegant.

Tufte isn’t just about making things look pretty – the epilogue of the latter book (excerpted above) says it best: “what is to be sought in designs for the display of information is the clear portrayal of complexity… that is, the revelation of the complex.” There are more books, too, but those are the two that I came across recently, and the thing is, he really means it. This man is in the business of taking data, getting rid of everything extraneous, superfluous, and distracting, presenting it in the most honest and unassuming form possible, and doing it in as accessible and user-friendly a way as possible. And you know what? Among other things, this is the business of science, too – to take good data, and force it reveal its secrets. Although Tufte comes from a social sciences background, I think his work is invaluable to any experimentalist, at the very least.