Edward Tufte

Edward Rolf Tufte (IPA /ˈtʌf.ti/) (born 1942 in Kansas City, Missouri to Virginia and Edward E. Tufte) is a professor emeritus of statistics, graphic design, and political economy at Yale University. He is also an expert in the presentation of informational graphics, such as infographics, charts, and graphs. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences. His work today centers on the field of information graphics.

Achievements

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 information displays. Tufte argues strongly against the inclusion of any decoration in visual presentations of information and claims that ink should only be used to convey significant data and aid in its interpretation.

Criticism of PowerPoint

Tufte became well-known by publishing his harsh criticism of Microsoft PowerPoint. In his essay The cognitive style of PowerPoint, Tufte criticizes many emergent properties of the software:

• Its use to guide and reassure a presenter, rather than to enlighten the audience;
• Unhelpfully simplistic tables and charts, resulting from the low resolution of computer displays;
• The outliner causing 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 a kind of image of objectivity and neutrality that people associate with science, technology, and "bullet points".

Tufte's criticism of the use 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" [1] in Volume 1 of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's report .

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 currently resides in Cheshire, Connecticut. He also travels around the United States, periodically offering one-day workshops on presenting data and information graphics.

Bibliography

Tufte's Yale PhD thesis was The civil rights movement and its opposition (1968).

Early in his career, Tufte wrote several books about using statistics to analyze political issues:

• 1973: Size & Democracy (with Robert A. Dahl). ISBN 0-8047-0834-7
• 1974: Data Analysis for Politics and Policy. ISBN 0-13-197541-2
  • Tufte notes on his website that a second edition of this book is likely after Beautiful Evidence is completed.
• 1978: Political Control of the Economy. ISBN 0-691-02180-5

The following books, all published by Tufte's own Graphics Press, make up the core of Tufte's work, documenting how to best display different forms of information with copious examples and commentary:

• 1983: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (pictures of numbers). ISBN 0-9613921-0-X
  • 2nd Edition published 2001
• 1990: Envisioning Information (pictures of nouns). ISBN 0-9613921-1-8
• 1997: Visual Explanations (pictures of verbs). ISBN 0-9613921-2-6
  • Chapter 2 is also published as Visual & Statistical Thinking: Displays of Evidence for Decision Making, ISBN 0-9613921-3-4. It contains extensive analysis of Dr John Snow's intervention into the cholera epidemic in London in 1854 and into the Challenger disaster of 1986.
• 2003: PowerPoint is evil [2]. Article in Wired,[3]
• 2004: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. ISBN 0-9613921-5-0 The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint
• 2006: Beautiful Evidence (visual evidence). ISBN 0-9613921-7-7

External links

• Edward Tufte's website with Ask E.T. forum Ask E.T. forum topic on publication of Beautiful Evidence
• EdwardTufte WikiWikiWeb
• The Data Artist
• 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

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