Beautiful Evidence

There are some really excellent and detailed reviews already posted here, and I will try not to duplicate their efforts. However for the benefit of those considering whether to purchase this book I will make some brief observations. First, this book demonstrates why Tufte continues to be more or less unique in the field of technical graphical communications. His broad sweep and his high equal concern with aesthetics, cognitive decision science, principles of handling evidence, and intellectual integrity all combine to produce uniquely valuable examples for how to help facts tell their otherwise often hidden story. Each of Tufte's books, including this one, clearly is a labor of love on his part, even to the point of sometimes being annoyingly painstaking. I almost don't want to sully his books with my scrawled margin notes and diagrams (but I do anyway, there's just too much there to think about to resist it!). Second, I think Tufte can be rightly accused of keeping the same basic presentation with relatively minor variation ever since his first remarkable and brilliant book in the series. If you just want to know the principles he espouses, you could probably just buy the first book and not bother with the rest. It is in leading by example and illustrating the core principles by example after detailed example of exceptional visual displays of information that the subsequent books, including Beautiful Evidence, add value to the corpus. There are some idiosyncrasies here that don't really pertain to evidence, such as photos of Tufte's own sculptures, but these arguably add a certain charm to the presentation and sometimes help to illustrate the unusual breadth of the author's application of principles. I don't find them particularly useful, but I've spoken with others with different interests who found them a fascinating addition. Third, Tufte's work, for all of its inspiration and care, is not detailed enough to stand on its own as a course in technical graphical communication. You need to supplement it with an education in graphing techniques, statistics, decision making, evidence handling, and so on, in order to apply the principles to real and novel cases. His main value is in culling the universal principles from all of these fields to help guide their application to real world unique circumstances. Beautiful Evidence, like Tufte's previous books in the series, illustrates masterpieces of technical communications and why they are masterpieces, it doesn't offer step by step instructions for recreating them. At his best, Tufte inspires your own genius, bridging art and science, he doesn't offer an algorithm for creating graphs. I think the worst you could say about Beautiful Evidence is the same as about Tufte's work in general, that he can become rather repetitive in his explanations, and may often tantalize you with brilliances that you may never be able to learn from or apply. The best I can often do is try to rememb

Disclosure: I am huge fan of Edward R. Tufte. As a professional designer and part-time educator, I create presentations and reports every week to review with customers and students. Over the years I have developed a style that I like to use, which can be called "minimal". Tufte's work over the years has given helped me refine ideas and given me justifiable reasons to promote stylistic elements in my own, and other's presentations. The book is truly a culmination of Tufte's ideas to date. Many of the concepts and techniques from his previous works are further defined and tailored to new examples. This tome considers a greater variety of communication and information. Many of his concepts continue to be refined, new ideas (new to me anyway), such as 'sparklines' are introduced and explored. I am amazed that every time I re-read a Tufte volume, I take away something new, usually because I am working on a different project with its own special information requirements, and I am able to see new opportunities for clarity. What this book, and Tufte's others lack, is description of how to implement what you may learn here. Realize that this is not a step-by-step guide to presentations. The theories here, such as the inclusion of graphics in-line with text to further enhance comprehension of the stated ideas, can be easily implemented if you know your computer tools and have a desire to make better communications. There is little description of how to achieve what these ideals propose. The book itself is also physically beautiful with heavy stock and perfect printing and graphics. It is part textbook, part heirloom. This is a comprehensive text covering many forms of visual communication. If you want to explore Tufte, but don't want to invest in all of his works, I recommend starting with this book.

Edward Tufte's three previous books -- The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, and Visual Explantions -- were good purchases. They're the sort of book that I go back to again and again, sometimes just browsing through just to get a little inspiration. Consequently, I looked forward to receiving Tufte's fourth major book on information design, Beautiful Evidence. There was something different about reading this book compared to the others, though. Tufte has posted several sections on his discussion board well in advance to get feedback on the ideas. I was one of the many "Kindly Contributors," as Tufte calls them, on those chapters, particularly one on phylogenetic trees. Further, one chapter had already been printed as a little booklet on PowerPoint. It so successful that it went to two editions. Furthermore, a cursory glance reveals many examples that Tufte has already talked about at some length in his earlier three books. There's the works of Galileo. There is a whole chapter about Minard's chart of Napolean's march towards Moscow, which Tufte pretty much single-handedly made famous in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, in which he said it might be the best statistical graph ever. High praise from a demanding taskmaster! Given that a good chunk of the book was already familiar to me, was there anything new to be learned? Absolutely. The first chapter concerns annotating pictures, which Tufte calls "mapped images." Right away, two of the books themes emerge. First, the importance of integration of different types of data. Here, pictures are the focus with the words providing supplemental information. Second, a concern is raised about dubious evidence, with the work of Ernst Mössel. Mössel tried to create a universal description of art, but ended up with a system that was so all encompassing that it could not be shown to be wrong. The second chapter continues on the theme of integrating information in Tufte's concept of sparklines. Sparklines are little mini graphs that are meant to be fully incorporated into text. A few people are experimenting with these, and there are a few sparkline plug-ins for word processors that can be found on the web. It will be interesting to see if any high end technical journal will consider using these routinely. The next chapter concerns using lines to link together. Tufte argues that most lines are underutilized, and could contain much more information and be much more useful than they usually are. The fourth chapter is, to my mind, the heart of the book: "Words, numbers, images -- together." That statement is simple, but the many excellent examples make this a deep exploration of the idea. A chapter section on Galileo's work is wonderful. Every scientist knows Galileo's contributions, but seeing them through Tufte's words and pictures gave me a much deeper appreciation of the impact Galileo had. Tufte credits Galileo with a "forever idea," which, in a word, mi

This is the fourth of Edward Tufte's books on the graphical display of information, and one might fear that he might be stretching the point too far and running out of ideas. One would be wrong, however, because this is a wonderful book, and is possibly the best of the four. It is a must-have, must-read, must-understand, must-apply sort of book. No one who is seriously interested in preparing illustrations for conveying information can afford to be unfamiliar with Tufte's ideas. Inevitably there is some overlap with the earlier books, but this is deliberate policy, not carelessness. As Tufte makes clear, it is better to repeat information than to expect readers to hunt for it somewhere else. Many potentially useful books have been rendered much more difficult to use than they ought to be, at worst by gathering together the artwork in one place, far away from the text that it relates to, or, slightly less bad, by failing to ensure that it appears on the same double-page spread as its accompanying text. Tufte doesn't even believe in referring to tables and figures by numbers, because he considers that any illustration can just be introduced with "here" or "in this example", etc., if it is properly placed. This is what he practises himself, but the technical demands of commercial publishers will make it difficult advice to follow, unfortunately. However, with modern computer-based publishing it ought to become easy in the future if enough pressure is put on publishers. If Galileo could integrate all of his diagrams into his text, why can we not do that now, with far more technical aids at our disposal than were available to him? The main new idea that appears in Beautiful Evidence is the description of sparklines: small, data-intense, word-like graphics -- word-like in the sense that a sparkline can appear right in the middle of a sentence, but can contain the equivalent of hundreds of numbers. Sparklines are ideal for conveying time series, such as a series of blood-glucose measurements for a diabetes patient. With suitable shading they can indicately instantly whether the measurements fall within the normal ranges. Tufte's short pamphlet about the presentation software PowerPoint, previously available as a separate publication, now appears as a chapter in Beautiful Evidence. His main points are that PowerPoint slides are typically so low in information-content that they insult the audiences they are directed towards, and that bulleted lists of slogans are just a pretence at supplying real arguments. Charles Joseph Minard's map of Napoleon's invasion of Russia already played a prominent role in the first book in the series, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and it reappears here, with a whole chapter devoted to analysing it. This is space well used, because to emulate Minard it is essential to go beyond a casual appreciation of his work as excellent; it demands a careful analysis of what it is that makes it excellent.

Out of all of the great ideas that are in this book, I am going to concentrate on the ones that relate to "what can be done with high-resolution display devices," such as 1200 dpi printers. An increasing amount of contemporary design is done for low-resolution displays, such as television and computer monitors. If we get a 1200 dpi version of one of these designs, as is easily possible with an inexpensive laser printer, we are not getting much benefit from that increased resolution. A lot of the ideas in Beautiful Evidence can be used today with Web scripts that generate PDF files to be printed. The rest of the ideas will be waiting for designers 20 years from now when computer monitors finally catch up to paper. dea 1: Sparklines (there are examples on the author's Web site). Tufte points out that nothing stops the modern printer from including small graphs right in-line with text or tables and that these graphs make comparisons much easier. Baseball fans will enjoy Tufte's depiction of a baseball season, first for one team and then for all teams. Tufte argues convincingly that showing history in a "sparkline" reduces "recency bias, the persistent and widespread over-weighting of recent events in making decisions." Idea 2: Forcing people to write English sentences instead of PowerPoint bullets results in a lot more clarity, especially with respect to causality. Idea 3: If you're running a business, figure out how to pack a huge amount of information, including sparklines, onto a single 11×17? sheet of paper and print it out on a laserprinter, then give it to decision makers. With that one sheet of paper, they will have as much information as 15 computer screenfuls or 300 PowerPoint slides. A thought-provoking book that will reward repeat scrutiny.