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My scavengings from Edward Tufte's book
Keywords | Text | Date | ID |
|---|---|---|---|
| Design / Information / Concept | Tufte's "sparklines" - "small, high-resolution graphics usually embedded in a full context of words, numbers, images. Sparklines are *datatwords*: data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics." "*wordlike* graphics, with an intensity of visual distinctions comparable to words and letters." | 09/24/07 | 11275 |
| Information / Design | Tufte's "First Principle for the analysis and presentation of data" -- "Show comparisons, contrasts, differences." Second Principle: "Show causality, mechanism, explanation, systematic structure." Third: "Show multivariate data; that is, show more than 1 or 2 variables." ("Nearly all the interesting worlds (physical, biological, imaginary, human) we seek to understand are inevitably multivariate in nature ... [Include conditions such as] interaction effects, multiple causes, multiple effects, causal sequences, sources of bias" etc. (129) Fourth: "Completely integrate words, numbers, images, diagrams." (Aim for "a broad, pluralistic, problem-directed view of what constitutes the scope of relevant evidence." "A deeper understanding of human understanding of human behavior may well result from integrating a diversity of evidence, *whatever it takes to explain something*") Fifth: "Thoroughly describe the evidence. Provide a detailed title, indicate the authors and sponsors, document the data sources, show complete measurement scales, point out relevant issues." Sixth: "Analytical presentations ultimately stand or fall depending on the quality, relevance, and integrity of their content." ("The most effective way to improve a presentation is to get better content.") | 09/24/07 | 11813 |
| Culture | Tufte: "Human activities ... take place in intensely comparative and multivariate contexts filled with causal ideas: intervention, purpose, responsibility, consequence, explanation, intention, action, prevention, diagnosis, strategy, decision, influence, planning." (139) | 09/24/07 | 11825 |
| Narrative / Spirituality | Flaubert: "The rage for wanting to conclude is one of the most deadly and most fruitless manias to befall humanity. Each religion and each philosophy has pretended to have God to itself, to measure the infinite, and to know the recipe for happiness. What arrogance and what madness! I see, to the contrary, that the greatest geniuses and the greatest works have never concluded." In Correspondance, Vol. V (1929) quoted by Tufte | 09/24/07 | 11848 |
| Teaching / Education / Information / Media: PowerPoint | Tufte on the "core ideas of teaching": "explanation, reasoning, finding things out, questioning, content, evidence, credible authority not patronizing authoritarianism" he notes that all of these are "contrary to the cognitive style of PowerPoint" | 09/24/07 | 11860 |
| Power / Art / Control / Propaganda | Jas Elsner, in "Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: The Art of the Roman Empire AD 100-450": "Power is a far more complex and mysterious quality than any apparently simple manifestation of it would appear. It is as much a matter of impression, of theatre, of persuading those over whom authority is wielded to collude in their subjugation. Insofar as power is a matter of presentation, its cultural currency in antiquity (and still today) was the creation, manipulation, and display of images. In the propagation of the imperial office, ... art was power." (quoted by Tufte) | 09/24/07 | 11872 |
| Communication / Information / Media: PowerPoint | Tufte: a talk proceeds "at a pace of 100 to 160 spoken words per minute" "People read 300 to 1,000 printed words a minute" "the PowerPoint slide typically shows 40 words, which is about 8 seconds of silent reading material" "The PP slide format has the worst signal / noise ratio of any known method of communication on paper or computer screen." | 09/24/07 | 11962 |
| Information | Harvard Business Review complains that "Lists can communicate only three logical relationships: sequence (first to last in time); priority (least to most important or vice versa); or simple membership in a set (these items relate to one another in some way, but the nature of that relationship remains unstated). And a list can only show one of those relationships at a time." Part of the perils of using bullet points Tufte, 170 | 09/24/07 | 11974 |