Brain Candy #120 - Unsung Heroes: Edward Tufte

I've written a few Brain Candy columns that focused on interesting individuals - Klaus Nomi, Rodger Young, and Oliver Sacks come to mind. The idea of including more short biographies frequently comes to me. I'd like to talk about some people who are more obscure than they should be. My first thought for a title was "Living Legends," but some of the people I want to talk about aren't around anymore, so I'm settling for "Unsung Heroes."

This month's column is about someone who's very much alive and is even now affecting our world - much for the better, in my opinion. Edward Tufte is most famous of late for his criticisms about the way the presentation graphics program Microsoft PowerPoint is used by speakers to the detriment of their message and their audience. One of his articles, for Wired magazine, is titled "PowerPoint Is Evil;" you can find it at www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html Some of his big complaints about PowerPoint are about how format dominates over content, and how little content tends to be present on typical PowerPoint slides. I've recently read a short article that purports to be from the original designers of PowerPoint and they seem to agree that a low density of content is characteristic of their creation, but they consider that a virtue. Tufte is particularly aghast at how some schools have substituted PowerPoint presentations for writing exercises. My thoughts on PowerPoint are that it can certainly be misused, and some organizations mandate in great detail precisely how it should be misused. I do think it can be used effectively, although the computer graphics that it supports are pretty crude compared to what we could do several decades ago with transparencies and slides. In the technical environment I work in, our PowerPoint slides tend to be dense and information-filled, with lots of imported tables and graphs. This is bad if these tables and graphs aren't important enough to justify their inclusion, but very good if they are carefully chosen and composed. This leads into another area that Tufte has pioneered.

I first discovered Tufte in the mid-1980s when I was trying to find better ways to present complex data. He is the author of a number of books on this and related subjects. His first book on the subject, "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information", published in 1983, is a modern classic. It's frequently present on lists of the best technical books of all time. After seventeen printings of the original edition, it was released in a second edition in 2001. This book, along with his others on the subject, is highly visual, containing many illustrative graphs - most pages have several. Some of these are modern, but there are some surprisingly old examples, too. He believes strongly that complex interrelationships among data need to be conveyed as simply as possible. Classical graphics are full of what he considers to be unnecessary fluff and Tufte is ruthless in paring out as much as possible He coined the term "chartjunk" to characterize all that is unnecessary and distracting in a typical chart, graph, or table. One thing definitely needs to be said about Tufte's stance on graphics. Minimalism is no excuse for ugliness; he gives many good examples in his books of what he considers to be spare, but excellent presentations of data that are also beautiful. One reviewer calls the field that Tufte deals with "cognitive art." Tufte has been hugely influential in this field- his first book has been referenced by 571 other books according to Amazon.com and ranks 1,133 in sales, which is quite good for a technical book that is six years old.

A minimalist graphical concept which he was responsible for naming is the "sparkline," which is a tiny high-resolution graphic that, in as few pixels as possible, shows the behavior of a variable, usually over time. One nice characteristic of sparklines is that they can be small enough to fit within the body of the text of a document, and can thus be a powerful tool to illustrate points without requiring the shift in focus needed to view a separate graphic. Sparklines are all over the web, especially on financial websites, where little graphs of things like stock prices, are used to great effect. There are a number of free and commercial implementations of sparklines. One of the Excel implementations that I've worked with can be found, in both free and commercial versions, at www.bissantz.de/sparklines/, along with a number of examples of how they can be used.

Tufte has his own web site at www.edwardtufte.com. Surprisingly, it's a bit hard to navigate, but there are a large number of links to his works and those of kindred spirits, as well as an assortment of things he offers for sale. He takes questions from his web audience, too. One of the most interesting products for sale is a poster-sized reproduction of what he considers the best statistical graphic ever drawn. It is Charles Joseph Minard's "Napoleon's March," which shows, through time, space and temperature, Napoleon's disastrous troop losses during the Russian campaign of 1812. This rich map/graph hybrid was created in 1869, showing the movements of the original French force across a map of Europe, represented as a band. The band has dates and local temperatures attached to it. As troops leave the main body, are killed in battle, freeze to death, or die of disease, the band representing the force gets narrower. What began as a very wide band thins continually until, by the end of the campaign, only a very thin line returns to France. It's a stunningly clear description of what happened, and rather than taking up several pages of verbiage, it allows the reader to either assess the campaign at a glance, or review it in minute detail, all in one integrated graph. Tufte's reverence for this and similar high-information density graphics is quite easily understood when you look at such an example.

Beside the web links above, check out the Wikipedia articles on "Edward Tufte," "Charles Joseph Minard" and "Sparkline" as starting points if you wish to know more.