User:Beltzner/Notes From Tufte Course

Edward Tufte - Presenting Data

Fundamental Truths of Visualizing Information 1. most interesting data is multivariate

• yet our communication techniques are 2d flatland
• escaping flatland is key

2. progress for communication devices is expressed in an increase of information resolution

• "what's my rate of information transfer" in a presentation
• corresponds to progress in intellectual history
• Gallileo's time was 10^-3 through 10^6
• our time is hundreds of times more than that

ex: Euclid's Geometry (Envisioning, p16)

• first excellent example of escaping flatland
• "people should put names on their work" to signal responsibility / pride
• paper is good beause euclidean geometry works in 2d
• triangle "ABC" :
  • don't force users to decode using a legend when a label will suffice
  • people come to learn, not to decode your design/encoding for information

PRINCIPLE: minimize decode time and increase cognitive appreciation

• proof of pythygorean theorem requires 44 round trips between text and diagram, each requiring a decode step
• visual proof is 1-step; "behold"
• Euclid used physical models in his book to escape flatland

QUOTE: "Notice these are sidenotes? This is where God wants footnotes."

ex: Napoleon's March to Moscow (poster) QUOTE: "This is war and peace as told by a visual Tolstoy."

• any policy decision is based on evidence of causality
• the map is merely descriptive, showing the location of the bad news
• temperature scale illustrates causality; it was the winter retreat that hurt a lot
• dimensions shown in this map:

1. size of army 2. location 2.1 longitude 2.2 latitude 3. direction 4. temperature

• multimodal display can yield richer communications and reduce round tripping

"GRAND PRINCIPLES" OF ANALYTICAL DESIGN 1. "Show comparisons" 2. "Show causality" 3. "Show multivariate data" 4. "Integrate word, number and image" 5. "Document everything and cite sources, scales, error" 6. "Presentations stand or fall based on quality, relevance and integrity of content" 7. "Adjescent in space is superior to stacked in time" 8. "Use small multiples" (or other mechanisms that illustrate whole-evidence summaries)

• note that these principles can be inverted to be principles of shrewd consumption
• that's because they're based on fundamental analytical tasks
• principles of design = f(principles of analytical thinking)

QUOTE: "Interest and boredom is not a function of decoration, it's a property of content." PRINCIPLE: Transform your critical thinking tasks into principles of information design

• first question should be "what is the thinking task that my presentation is supposed to help with"
  • dictates type of content, information architecture, etc.
  • gets us out of the business of "what's cool" and "what's hot"

• claim that these principles are universal and indifferent to the environment
  • makes techniques for cartography equivalent to techniques for websites
  • evidence: natural laws are causal, multimodal, integrated, etc.
  • thus: principles are universal due to neccesity of our natural environment

QUESTION: what about emotional impact of design? how can one design for that? should one?

ex: Gallileo's Discovery of Saturn & Sunspots (Envisioning, p18)

• embedded image right alongside word
• "Saturn looks like this" ... "when it's blurry, it looks like this" ...
• elegant, focus on data, design is transparent
• sunspot data that proved that the sun rotates

GEM: Adjescent Information >> Information Stacked in Time

• information stacked in time ("one damned thing after another" / "computer interface")
• information resolution is powerful for putting more information in a single eyespan
  • our visual system is very high resolution & very selective in terms of processing
  • computer screens are trivial by comparison, and thus cannot present overload
  • bad _design_ creates overload, not amount of information

QUOTE: "The single best thing you can do to get better information on a computer (other than getting a Mac) is to get a great, big, high resolution display."

• • people doing serious analytics on computer usually use multiple monitors
  • this is why voicemail systems are so annoying

QUESTION: so why is animation better? because the time-delay is short enough that we can keep the previous image in mind?

• sunspot data includes throwaway line "the annual movement of the earth"

QUOTE: "How religious faith got mixed up with astrological data is an idea that, I think, escapes anyone outside of Kansas."

• represents the incredible change in the way our society analysed thought and principles
  • previously all thinking was done by philosophers
  • winning theories were those that were most eloquent or endorsed by church
  • this represents a shift to data/evidence based reasoning

ex: Shiner's Refuting of Sunspots (Envisioning, p19)

• uses small multiples
• once the viewer figures out the format, small multiples can be quickly scanned and compared
• takes advantage of user's investment in decoding the format
• implicit credibility through repetition and exploration/mastery of detail, showing all data

QUOTE: "The single biggest threat to learning the truth from a presentation is evidence selection by the presenter"

• no such thing as objectivity, everyone's an advocate for something, usually their POV

QUOTE: "When a company beats the quarterly expectations by a penny, that's nice. When 20% of all companies do, that's perjury."

• repeated studies are an excellent way to protect against cherry-picking/evidence selection
• initial biotech studies are always the most positive explorations
  • subsequent designs exhibit more control, less enthusiasm, more critical review
  • more comparative data is avaiable which prevents cherry-picking

ex: John Gotti's "spreadsheet of crime" acquittal chart (Envisioning, p31)

• this is a large multiple
• yet these are "dummy variables"; they don't show multiplicity!
• Cardinale was, in fact, convicted of murder 5 times
• most obnoxious crimes are placed near top or bottom of chart for visual impact
• information is adjescent in space, perhaps in order of testimonies
  • accomodates different cognitive styles
  • some will follow, some will peek ahead, some will draw their own comparisons
• better than flipcharts/powerpoint since it lets the viewer explore it at their own speed/style