The Visual Display of Quantitative Information By Edward R. Tufte

Although originally published in 1983, when professional graphics artists prepared most of the charts and graphs used in presentations and official publications, this book remains useful for anyone who wishes to convey information clearly and concisely.

I can remember a job early in my career when all presentations had to be approved by two levels of management, then submitted to the graphics shop at least a week before they were to be used, and what came back was an inter-office envelope full of transparencies to be shown on an overhead projector. We have come a long way since then, but powerful graphics software has not necessarily improved our ability to get the message across in an understandable and informative way.

Tufte starts with some history of the statistical graph. It took a long time for people to make the conceptual leap from a quantity to an abstract visual representation of that quantity as a line or a bar positioned between several axes. The first charts were derived from maps, but maps had existed for five thousand years before charts and graphs appeared in the 1700s.

By the 20th century newspapers, magazines, and business and government publications all included graphics, but they were often done ineptly, because they were created by artists, not the people who understood the data. “At the core of the preoccupation with deceptive graphics was the assumption that data graphics were mainly devices for showing the obvious to the ignorant.” (p. 53) The book has many egregiously bad examples, some of which appeared to be deliberately deceptive (such as hiding a business loss by making the y-axis start below zero), and some just incompetently done, apparently by graphics artists who wanted to make a pretty picture without the least understanding of what the data meant. “Inept graphics also flourish because many graphic artists believe that statistics are boring and tedious. It then follows that decorated graphics must pep up, animate, and all too often exaggerate what evidence there is in the data.” (p. 79)

The book’s value comes from the fact that Tufte has a number of specific recommendations for how to present data, and he cites good examples as well as bad. The defining graphic in the book is Charles Joseph Minard’s 1861 graph showing the fate of Napoleon’s army in Russia. It is a powerful image, telling the dramatic story of an army withering away on the march to and from Moscow. It manages to plot multiple variables on a two-dimensional page: the size of the army, its location in Russia, the direction of the army’s movement, dates of specific events, and temperatures along the route of retreat. Once seen, the graph is unforgettable.

There is also another brilliant example, a graph by E.J. Marey showing train schedules from Paris to Lyon in the 1880s. At first it looks like a jumble of broken diagonal lines, but then it resolves itself. The slope of the line indicates the speed of the train, the horizontal breaks show where the train is stopped at a station, the x-axis shows the time of the trip (at start, finish, and points along the way), and the y-axis the towns the train passes through. A great deal of information is packed into a simple, easy to read image. The train schedules put out by Amtrak today are far less intuitive and informative.

Tufte’s recommendations boil down one word: simplify. He coined the word “chartjunk,” and recommends paring everything down to its essentials. His fundamental precepts are:

Five principles in the theory of data graphics produce substantial changes in graphical design. The principles apply to many graphics and yield a series of design options through cycles of graphical revision and editing.

Above all else show the data.
Maximize the data-ink ratio.
Erase non-data-ink.
Erase redundant data-ink.
Revise and edit.
(p. 105)

Somewhere along the way in my career I came to internalize some of Tufte’s ideas without knowing I was doing so. Whenever I saw a presentation filled with clipart, with animated, dancing whatevers, with unnecessary three dimensional charts and distracting bright colors I concluded that the presenter was either an idiot or was actively trying to hide something the viewer wasn’t supposed to notice. Subsequent events usually proved me right.

If there is one thing that Tufte hates above all else it is the pie chart. “the only worse design than a pie chart is several of them, for then the viewer is asked to compare quantities located in spatial disarray both within and between pies.” (p.178) Since they only display a small number of data points anyway, you are better off making a simple number chart.

This book is worth reading, and will make you think about how to best present your information. Some of the examples he provides are old, including a couple that were certainly created on ancient dot-matrix printers, but his advice remains excellent. For those interested in his additional ideas about graphics presentation, he also wrote Envisioning Information (1990) and Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (1997). 0961392142 Well, 3 1/2 stars, really, but GoodReads won't permit that. Don't let the horrifically dull title fool you. Edward Tufte knows a thing or two about chart design, to say the least (he's built a second career on this obsession). Think this is dull stuff? Ha, and again I say ha. It's darn sexy. Don't believe me? Consider this consequence of the era of optimism or this version of Little Red Riding Hood or this nifty day-in-the-life or this graphic design shop which is such a brilliant specialist in the whimsical-cum-nostalgic info-graphic style that They Might Be Giants commissioned them to produce everything from the liner notes to Mink Car to the flash animations embedded on No! to their website TMBG.com.

And Tufte's book has its share of worthwhile Aha! moments as well. Take this snippet from p. 20, which follows six maps of the continental US depicting various types of cancer over a 19 year period by age, sex, and county. Tufte points out the clarity and key moments of interest in the various images (such as death rates in areas where you have lived), and then critiques: The maps repay careful study. Notice how quickly and naturally our attention has been directed toward exploring the substantive content of the data rather than toward questions of methodology and technique. Nonetheless the maps do have their flaws. They wrongly equate the visual importance of each county with its geographic area rather than with the number of people living in the county (or the number of cancer deaths). Our visual impression of the data is entangled with the circumstance of geographic boundaries, shapes, and areas -- the chronic problem afflicting shaded-in-area designs of such 'blot maps' or 'patch maps.' He goes on to further dissect the presentation and the foundational data in a way that I would never have dreamed of. Talk about your perfectionists... these map examples were drawn by him.

At any rate, this book is all about comprehensible, usable design, and Tufte even designed it for maximum impact. Its slim girth (a mere 190 pages) is chock-full of historic graphical errors and successes, but you can read the first 50 alone and get the idea. Given that, I'm a bit taken aback (and yet strangely curious) to have discovered that Tufte has managed to produce at least three more disparate volumes.

However, I've since learned that Tufte has some serious (and seriously earned) followers. Just last week, on the theory of in for a penny, in for a pound, I attended a program on improving data analytics, and was pulled aside at the end by one of the organizers who spotted my copy of The Visual Display.... An important book, he sagely nodded. You should have them all. But check out Steven Few's perceptualedge.com, he continued. That's where the rubber really meets the road.

Okay, fine, leave me alone! I swear that I'll never look at another pie chart again, just don't make me give up my dependence on the color copier? 0961392142 This was a wonderful, short book about the best ways to present quantitative information. If it sounds like a boring topic, compared to the Excel manuals it is a gripping read ;-) I thought his suggestions were excellent and it was quite a pleasure to read. I hope that my own powerpoints and Power BI reports will be positively influenced by this reading. 0961392142 TODO full review:
i As it turns out, I've read this book from start to finish three times already. Time to give some time to paying back, with a decent review.
+++ Overall, this is an excellent book. My acts speak for themselves: I return periodically to this extraordinary book, seemingly, every few years, to learn and be amused again by its material. It has everything I am looking for about in the design of information visualizations: the historical perspective, insight into how a designer works for this field, principles that are explained and enforced, a creative element (sparklines! small multiples!!), great book design, and even idiosyncratic writing.
+ Edward R. Tufte's [The Visual Display of Quantitative Information] has not aged a bit in its second edition (nearly two decades after its inception and first print). It remains the gold standard in the field: understand the problem, survey existing instances of the problem, address the problem, discuss where to go next.
+ The wealth of historical sources is nicely calibrated, with a predilection for old English time series (associated with good early practice), and for modern Japanese statistics and train schedules (associated with the highest performance). The former is easy to explain: with the age of mechanization, and its penchant for standardization (new) and tax collection (quite old), Ol'Britain has gone to extremes to perfect the communication of qualitative and especially quantitative information. Although, in the end, it's mostly William Playfair (and Joseph Priestley, and Encyclopedia Britannica), the subtext is that there is a wealth of good graphing in the British Empire's history. The coverage of Japanese material seems odd, past the moment when the reader encounters the explanation of the ubiquitous presence of statistical material in the Japanese daily life, and until Edward R. Tufte's analysis of the statistical (visual) content in tens of newspapers and magazines across the world. As it turns out, in the late-1970s and early 1980s the (now) reputable New York Time, Times, and Washington Post were mere doodlers, waddling in relatively simple graphics and even simpler statistics when the Japanese material was already sophisticated and catering to a mature audience.
++/- The principles of good design are sound, simple, and few. With today's eye, they seem not so much good as associated with good practice for trying them out. The only caveat: there is no room for artsy presentations of data in Edward R. Tufte's world; it's minimalism and that should be it, carry on, thank you.
+ The book is deep, so the text is actually both difficult and required reading. This goes in contrast to the approach of many other books in the field, in particular, the series of introductory material from Stephen Few. (I found a good balance between finding new interesting material, and summarizing the principles and good practice, in Nathan Yau's Visualize This: The Flowingdata Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics and especially Data Points: Visualization That Means Something; but these books do not propose new types of information visualizations. I found a much deeper treatment of the historical material, with good taxonomical features and analysis, in Manuel Lima's
The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge and somewhat also in The Book of Circles: Visualizing Spheres of Knowledge.)
+ The innovative graphs, sparklines and (perhaps not invented here!) small multiples, are good tools. Sparklines are condensed high-resolution, high-frequency graphs amenable to depicting seemingly random processes over short and long periods of time. Small multiples are repetitions of a main visualization theme in a constrained space, so that the differences between repetitions convey the maximal surprise and thus capture the most the viewer's attention.
- Perhaps the only negative aspect is the presence and frequency of disparaging remarks. To Edward R. Tufte, the world is made of professionals adhering to his rules, or to makers of ugly duck-buildings. 0961392142 I think it is safe to say that two monumental names of data-viz are bound to be recurrently recognised - the eye catching master of data pop-art David McCandless and the creator of beautifully simple and elegant data display Edward Tufte. Both of these data visualisers have some overlap - both are, after all, incredibly capable of transmitting complex data and information in striking displays - but it is Tufte's love of simplicity and worship of data that renders him a phenomenal graphical visualisation composer. In The Visual Display of Quantitative Information he sets out to present some of his more famous inventions for the graphical display of information, namely the range-frame and the dot-dash-plot. Before presenting these, he sets out several guidelines which are key when producing graphics for the visualisation of any form of data and that hold truthful to this day. A must-read for anyone looking to make their data visualisations clear, clean and impactful. 0961392142

Free read Ø PDF, DOC, TXT, eBook or Kindle ePUB free ó Edward R. Tufte

The classic book on statistical graphics, charts, tables. Theory and practice in the design of data graphics, 250 illustrations of the best (and a few of the worst) statistical graphics, with detailed analysis of how to display data for precise, effective, quick analysis. Design of the high-resolution displays, small multiples. Editing and improving graphics. The data-ink ratio. Time-series, relational graphics, data maps, multivariate designs. Detection of graphical deception: design variation vs. data variation. Sources of deception. Aesthetics and data graphical displays.
This is the second edition of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Recently published, this new edition provides excellent color reproductions of the many graphics of William Playfair, adds color to other images, and includes all the changes and corrections accumulated during 17 printings of the first edition. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Edward Tufte is brilliant. His books, including this one, are artwork disguised as a textbook. The purpose of all three is to explain both good and bad ways of explaining information but they are so much more than that. There is a rich history interwoven in the books' pages. The examples are so interesting that I found myself learning more than just how to convey information. For example, one of the best graphics for conveying information ever made is a chart/map tracking Napoleon Bonaparte's army's march across Europe which is so impressive it's difficult to describe. The graph includes information about army size, location and timeline in a very readable, straightforwd and yet still beautiful way.

I was fortunate enough to attend one of his seminars after I was already a fan (my work paid for it and I got to keep the books!) which delves into all of his texts. I highly recommend it because he synthesizes the information beautifully and succinctly and you get all of his books and publications in print. If you can't make the seminar (no, I do not get any kickbacks, promise) the books are rather complex but they are absolutely stunning and make fascinating reading. 0961392142 The book led was one of the most enlightening books that I've every read. I've always had a penchant for using numbers, images, and heuristics to explain, and began taking Edward Tufte's courses when the opportunity arose, starting in 1998. He held them in hotel ballrooms throughout the United States, and his followers attended with cult-like repetition, sometimes registering for the same course 6 times in one year.

Edward Tufte is one of the most elegant designers of information alive today, the book was the beginning of my devotion to his philosophy of the visual articulation of facts, figures, and abstract concepts. This book, as well as professor Tufte's academic publishing, have influenced the world around us in so many ways. From the eloquent graphical explanations in the New York Times, to the vibrant digital displays of political elections on Fox News, and the historical statistics of hurricanes put forth on Weather Channel - all of this traces its heritage back to Edward Tufte and his award winning books.

If you want to escape the two-dimensional hell of explanation that is the improper use of Powerpoint, this books and its two companions, provide safe passage to the promised land of clear, robust, graphical discourses of complex ideas. 0961392142 When I started secondary school I was mildly apprehensive about 'physics', an unfamiliar word that elicited an actual shudder from my mother. Fortunately, my elderly teacher had an infectious affection for his subject. I remember that he noticed me examining the monthly night-sky chart pinned to the classroom door, and thereafter would print off an extra copy specially and wordlessly hand it to me if he saw me in the corridor (never in class, not wishing to embarrass me*) Our first lessons tried to tell us what the subject was all about, and a poetic but confusing article telling me that it was about, among other things, not being able to push a blade of grass into the trunk of an oak tree demonstrated clearly that some things are better learned by seeing and doing than by reading.

*he needn't have worried: evidence of my geekiness was not in short supply.

One of our early experiments was The One With The Pendulum (turns out that in the UK this is an A-level practical! I guess in those days secondary school wasn't all OMG exam in 5 years PANIC), and our homework was to write it up. When I had finished it, I must have shown my Dad, as he asked why there was no graph. We weren't told to draw a graph I replied. But graphs are wonderful, he said. Let's draw one anyway. and he showed me how. Our graph, which is probably still in my parents' attic somewhere, plotted length of pendulum against swing time, which unfortunately yields an exponential curve that's hard to work with. You can (when you do the experiment at A-level) linearise the graph's equation by plotting the square of the time period, and then the gradient tells us 'little g', the strength of the Earth's gravitational field. Neat, eh?



I have taught science for a few years now and I could not have failed to notice that many kids hate graphs and graph drawing. It is unquestionably hard work and needs an understanding of numbers and design logic. I'm lucky that I got an undeserved merit for drawing an unsolicited graph in my first month of high school, because since that day I've been totally freaky for a nice chart (these two pictures are from my own lab book, not the text). This review is dedicated to my Dad.



Tufte really loves data. This book has an informative, accurate, but kinda DRY title. I would have called it

SHOW US THE DATA



uhhhh-uhhhh I've made a mistake. Tufte says thinking data is boring leads to bad, lying graphs. If your data is boring, why are you even presenting it? He is crisply derisive of the idea that data needs graphically sexing up to be understood. As Freire tells us

TRUST YOUR AUDIENCE.

Tufte bemoans that graphs are designed and drawn by folks trained as artists, rather than folks trained in the relevant mathematics. Graphical competence demands three quite different skills: the substantive, statistical and artistic... Allowing artist-illustrators to control the design and content of statistical graphics is almost like allowing typographers to control the content, style and editing of prose. Don't decorate the data, REVEAL IT.



Bad graphics also lack integrity. Intead of SHOWING THE DATA, they distort it, usually for some political end. There are LOTS of examples



And here is a modern example I couldn't resist adding XD



However, the concern with graphical integrity has often not helped. It tends to encourage the general dislike of graphs and the tendency for publications to dumb them down. Tufte points out that while graphical sophistication is usually low in news publications, journals and text books, the text sophistication is high, sometimes requiring expert knowledge!

Many data sets are better presented in a well-organised table than in a drawing. Tufte follows this principle in presenting data on graphical sophistication and data density, and in showing his commissioned designs. One super table is far better than a hundred little bar charts



Oh and for the love of all that is good, follow da Vinci and put the damn chart next to the text, or better nested cosily inside. None of this 'see fig. 2'



Tufte radically redesigns the histogram and the scatter plot to remove distractions and non-data ink, moving towards clarity, data density and design grace. I won't spoil. As for the pie, keep it in the kitchen and put pumpkin in it: 'pie charts should never be used'

There is plenty of graph-porn for us chart junkies (as opposed to chart-junk, which is definitely out). Tufte's favourite is Charles Joseph Minard's extremely famous infographic of Napoleon's army attempting to invade Russia in 1812-1813. He loves it so much it's reprinted four times...



But there are all sorts of lovely maps and charts for your graphical delectation.

Debunking the junk is what Ed is here for and the pleasure of the text is in the ARID humour he deploys and the way he trusts the reader to be a fellow smarty-pants. In more of a folks-are-smart way, not an elitist you-and-me-are-smart way. I was laughing. When a quoted designer says he's all about 'conveying the essential spirit of the data'. Tufte has got me primed. Fool NO! Show me the DATA, not its 'essence' and not its 'spirit'

If you work with data, if you draw graphics, if you look at graphics, if you're interested in politics, economics, geography or science, if you like maths, art, design, truth, beauty, love…

read this. 0961392142 2.5 stars. I read this book because 1) as a scientist, I care a lot about visualizing information in ways that are both meaningful and attractive, and 2) this book is hailed as a classic and cited by many when discussing what constitutes a good graphic. After eying it on many coffee tables and office bookshelves, I finally decided to pick it up from the library. I'm glad that I didn't buy it.

There are some positives: a few inspiring examples of creative, precise designs that tell a story and reveal insights about the data. Some of the negative examples (graphs that exaggerate or obscure the data, or that are heavy-handed and ugly) are also useful to think about, and are occasionally very funny. I also liked how it touched on the history and evolution of different types of graphs.

However, a major flaw is the lack of thought that was put into the writing. Many of the axioms that Tufte proposes for graphics could equally well apply to writing. For example, don't patronize your audience, and don't waste ink on non-information. Tufte unfortunately goes against both these principles with his disdainful, verbose tone. A great deal of verbiage and jargon could be stripped away to yield a text with much higher information density (to use his own term). The advice presented is reasonable, but much of it is just common sense for anyone who's paid a little attention to elementary math/statistics, or who simply takes the time to look at graphs and think about how they could be improved.

He also contradicts his own advice about providing adequate explanation for plots by offering zero explanation for several plots that are nearly inscrutable, beyond saying this is great or this is silly. His attitude towards artists is especially belittling - I was hoping for a more thoughtful take on the balance between beauty and practicality in graphic design. All in all, I think this the book has some smart points and good images, but not quite enough to warrant its position on a pedestal. 0961392142 People have told me to read this book for years and I've always been impressed by the strength of their recommendations.

However, on reading this book, I was initially underwhelmed. I felt like Tufte was just rehashing common sense about graphs. I read through it and found myself saying, 'yeah yeah, I get it.'

On reflection a week after finishing, I realized this book is genius. Tufte concisely and clearly articulates principles, which should be common sense, so well that they have appearance to be common sense. 0961392142