Edward Tufte

Biography

Edward Rolf Tufte was born in 1942 in Kansas City, Missouri, to Virginia Tufte and Edward E. Tufte. He grew up in Beverly Hills, California, and graduated from Beverly Hills High School. He received a BA and MS in statistics from Stanford University and a PhD in political science from Yale. His dissertation, completed in 1968, was entitled The Civil Rights Movement and Its Opposition. He was then hired by Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, where he taught courses in political economy and data analysis while publishing three quantitatively inclined political science books.

In 1975, while at Princeton, Tufte was asked to teach a statistics course to a group of journalists who were visiting the school to study economics. He developed a set of readings and lectures on statistical graphics, which he further developed in joint seminars he subsequently taught with renowned statistician John Tukey, a pioneer in the field of information design. These course materials became the foundation for his first book on information design, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

Tufte self-published his Visual Display in 1982, working closely with graphic designer Howard Gralla. He financed the work by taking out a second mortgage on his home. The book quickly became a commercial success and secured his transition from political scientist to information expert.

Work

Tufte 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 Study in Behavioral Sciences.

Information design

Visual Explanations, Tufte’s third book in a series on information display.

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.

He uses the term “data-ink ratio” to argue against using excessive decoration in visual displays of quantitative information. In Visual Display, Tufte states:

Sometimes decorations can help editorialize about the substance of the graphic. But it’s wrong to distort the data measureshe ink locating values of numbersn order to make an editorial comment or fit a decorative scheme.

Tufte also encourages the use of data-rich illustrations with all the available data presented. When examined closely, every data point has value; when seen overall, trends and patterns can be observed. Tufte suggests these macro/micro readings be presented in the space of an eyespan, in the high resolution format of the printed page, and at the unhurried pace of the viewer’s leisure. Tufte uses several historical examples to make his case including John Snow’s cholera outbreak map, Charles Joseph Minard’s Carte Figurative, early space debris plots, and Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. For instance, the listing of the names of deceased soldiers on the black granite of Lin’s sculptural memorial is shown to be more powerful as a chronological rather than as an alphabetical list. The sacrifice each individual made is thus highlighted within the overall scope of the war.

Criticism of PowerPoint

Tufte has criticized the way Microsoft PowerPoint is typically used. In his essay “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”, Tufte criticizes many properties and uses of the software:

It is used to guide and reassure a presenter, rather than to enlighten the audience;

It has unhelpfully simplistic tables and charts, resulting from the low resolution of early computer displays;

The outliner causes 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 (in particular, difficulty in using scientific notation);

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 an 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” in Volume 1 (page 191) of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board’s report.

Tufte argues that the most effective way of presenting information in a technical setting, such as an academic seminar or a meeting of industry experts, is by distributing a brief written report that can be read by all participants in the first 5 to 10 minutes of the meeting. Tufte believes that this is the most efficient method of transferring knowledge from the presenter to the audience. The rest of the meeting is then devoted to discussion and debate.

Sparkline

Sparklines

U.S. stock market activity (February 7, 2006)

Index

Day

Value

Change

Dow Jones

10765.45

32.82 (0.30%)

S&P 500

1256.92

8.10 (0.64%)

Nasdaq

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. Tufte explains the sparkline as a kind of “word” that conveys rich information without breaking the flow of a sentence or paragraph made of other “words” both visual and conventional.

Bibliography

Tufte has written several books about using statistics to analyze political issues. A selection:

1968. The Civil Rights Movement and Its Opposition. PhD thesis.

1973. Size & Democracy. with Robert Dahl. Stanford University Press. ISBN 0804708347.

1974. Data Analysis for Politics and Policy. Prentice Hall College Div. ISBN 0131975250.

1978. Political Control of the Economy. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691075948.

Among his works on the theory and practice of designing graphs, charts and maps are:

1983. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.

1990. Envisioning Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. ISBN 0961392118.

1997. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. ISBN 0961392126.

2003. “PowerPoint is evil”. In: Wired 11 (9). ISSN 1059-1028. .

2003. The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. ISBN 0961392169.

2006. Beautiful Evidence. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. ISBN 0961392177.

References

^ http://www.yale.edu/polisci/people/etufte.html Yale University: Political Science: Edward Tufte

^ Edward Tufte website

^ Reynolds, Christopher. “ART; Onward means going upward; Edward Tufte has spent his career fighting the visually dull and flat. Even his sculpture is a leap.”, Los Angeles Times, November 14, 2002. Accessed April 23, 2008. “Edward Tufte], who shares 20 acres (81,000 m2) in Cheshire, Conn., with his wife, graphic design professor Inge Druckrey, and three golden retrievers, is a 1960 graduate of Beverly Hills High School.”

^ a b Mark Zachry and Charlotte Thralls, An interview with Edward R. Tufte, Technical Communication Quarterly, 2004.

^ Kosslyn, Stephen Michael (2006). Graph design for the eye and mind. Oxford University Press. p. 126. ISBN 978-0195311846. 

^ Tufte, Edward. Envisioning Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2001. Pages 43-44.

^ “Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report Volume 1″, August 2003, p. 15

^ PowerPoint Does Rocket Science–and Better Techniques for Technical Reports

External links

Edward Tufte’s website

The Data Artist

Intelligent Designs Article in Stanford University’s alumni magazine

The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint Presented in the Form of a PowerPoint Presentation

Representation and Misrepresentation: Tufte and the Morton Thiokol Engineers on the Challenger criticizes Tufte’s analysis of NASA graphics in Visual Explanations

Ivy League Rock and Roll – A day with Edward Tufte Review of a Tufte seminar, including discussion of his work

Art Directors Club biography, portrait and images of work

A review of Edward Tufte’s ‘Beautiful Evidence’

Preceded by

John Chapline

ACM SIGDOC Rigo Award

1992

Succeeded by

Jay Bolter

v  d  e

Visualization of technical information

Fields

Biological data visualization  Chemical imaging  Crime mapping  Data visualization  Educational visualization  Flow visualization  Geovisualization  Information visualization  Mathematical visualization  Medical imaging  Molecular graphics  Product visualization  Scientific visualization  Software visualization  Technical drawing  Volume visualization

Image types

Chart  Computer graphics  Diagram  Graph of a function  Engineering drawing  Ideogram  Information graphics  Map  Photograph  Pictogram  Plot  Statistical graphics  Table  Technical drawings  Technical illustration

Experts

Jacques Bertin  Stuart Card  Thomas A. DeFanti  Michael Friendly  Nigel Holmes  Alan MacEachren  Jock D. Mackinlay  Michael Maltz  Bruce H. McCormick  Charles Joseph Minard  Otto Neurath  William Playfair  Clifford A. Pickover  Arthur H. Robinson  Lawrence J. Rosenblum  Adolphe Quetelet  George G. Robertson  Ben Shneiderman  Edward Tufte

Related topics

Cartography  Computer graphics  Graph drawing  Graphic design  Imaging science  Information science  Mental visualisation  Neuroimaging  Scientific modelling  Spatial analysis  Visual analytics  Visual perception

Persondata

NAME

Tufte, Edward Rolf

ALTERNATIVE NAMES

SHORT DESCRIPTION

American statistician and Professor Emeritus of statistics, information design, interface design and political economy

DATE OF BIRTH

1942

PLACE OF BIRTH

Kansas City, Missouri

DATE OF DEATH

PLACE OF DEATH

Categories: 1942 births | AIGA Medalists | American statisticians | Communication design | Living people | Information graphic designers | People from the Kansas City metropolitan area | Yale University faculty | Visualization experts | Fellows of the American Statistical Association
About the Author

I am an expert from China Chemicals Products, usually analyzes all kind of industries situation, such as decorative glass ball , flashing hair braids.

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