Discover

'Edward Rolf Tufte' (IPA /ˈtʌf.ti/) (born 1942 in Kansas City, Missouri, to Virginia and Edward E. Tufte), a professor emeritus of statistics, information design, interface design, and political economy at Yale University^[1] has been described by ''The New York Times'' as "the Leonardo da Vinci of Data". He is an expert in the presentation of informational graphics such as charts and diagrams, and is a fellow of the American Statistical Association. Tufte has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences.
Tufte lives in Cheshire, Connecticut. He periodically travels around the United States to offer one-day workshops on data presentation and information graphics.

Contents

Achievements

Criticism of PowerPoint

Sparkline

Bibliography

References

External links

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 quantitative information displays. Tufte uses the term 'data-ink ratio' and argues strongly against the inclusion of any non-informative decoration in visual presentations of quantitative information and claims that ink should only be used to convey significant data and aid in its interpretation. In chapter 2 of ''The Visual Display of Quantitative Information'', Tufte states:

Criticism of PowerPoint

Tufte has criticized the way Microsoft PowerPoint is typically used. 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 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	Sparkline dowjones.svg	10765.45	−32.82 (−0.30%)
S&P 500	Sparkline sp500.svg	1256.92	−8.10 (−0.64%)
Nasdaq	Sparkline nasdaq.svg	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.

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:

★ Size & Democracy, , Robert, Dahl, Stanford University Press, 1973,

★ Data Analysis for Politics and Policy, , Edward R., Tufte, Prentice Hall College Div, ,

★
★ Tufte notes on his website that a second edition of this book is likely.

★
★ Tufte now owns the copyright and has made a free pdf of DAPP available on his website.

★ Political Control of the Economy, , Edward R., Tufte, Princeton University Press, 1978,
The core of Tufte's work documents how to best display different forms of information with copious examples and commentary:

★ The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, , Edward R., Tufte, Graphics Press, 2001,

★ Envisioning Information, , Edward R., Tufte, Graphics Press, 1990,

★ Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, , Edward R., Tufte, Graphics Press, 1997,

★
★ Chapter 2 is also published as Visual & Statistical Thinking: Displays of Evidence for Decision Making, , Edward R., Tufte, Graphics Press, 1997, It contains extensive analysis of Dr John Snow's intervention into the cholera epidemic in London in 1854 and of the ''Challenger'' disaster of 1986.

★ PowerPoint is evil, , Edward R., Tufte, Wired, 2003

★ The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, , Edward R., Tufte, Graphics Press, 2006,

★ Beautiful Evidence, , Edward R., Tufte, Graphics Press, 2006,

References

1. Edward Tufte website

External links

★ Edward Tufte's website with Ask E.T. forum Ask E.T. forum topic on publication of Beautiful Evidence

★

★ The Data Artist

★ Intelligent Designs Article in Stanford University's alumni magazine

★ ''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''

★ Ivy League Rock and Roll - A day with Edward Tufte Review of a Tufte seminar, including discussion of his work]