Pseudo-book review: Edward Tufte

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

Edward Tufte knows data - boy, does he ever. He knows how to coax it, interrogate it, force it to reveal its secrets, force it to present itself in the Best Possible Way. Perhaps best known in some circles for his scathing critique of Microsoft Powerpoint, he 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 simply astounding.

And it’s not 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.

(Now if only the books weren’t so expensive, as I presume design books tend to be. That’s the good thing of being on a university campus - our libraries have everything. That being said, Tufte gives one-day courses on this stuff - one of which will be here in Philadelphia in a few months - but they’re $360 a pop, so there’s no way this poor college kid is meeting The Man anytime soon.)

~ by Sujit on January 26, 2007.