Edward Tufte

Edward Rolf Tufte (pronounced /ˈtʌfti/) (born 1942) is an American statistician and Professor Emeritus of statistics, information design, interface design and political economy at Yale University.^[1]

Biography

Edward Rolf Tufte was born in 1942 in Kansas City, Missouri, to Virginia and Edward E. Tufte. He grew up in Beverly Hills, California, and graduated from Beverly Hills High School.^[2] 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 legendary 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.^[3]

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.^[3]

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 including non-informative decoration in visual displays of quantitative information, and says that all ink not used to convey and display data should be eliminated.^[4] In Visual Display, 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.

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.^[5]

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 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;
• 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" ^[6] 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 which 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.^[7]

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

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'