Beautiful Evidence
by Edward R. Tufte
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Book Reviews of Beautiful Evidence
Book Review: Great for the Undergraduate Classroom
Summary: 5 Stars
Edward Tufte is a Yale political scientist turned information architect who brings 1500 years of analytic design together (including the histories of science and art) to create a very unique presentation that ET delivers in person each year to packed houses in large cities. He is known for his intense criticism of PowerPoint and his work on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board that catapulted him to fame alongside Richard P. Feynmann, who said [about the Challenger Disaster], "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled (p.168)."
Beautiful Evidence has nine chapters (Mapped Pictures; Sparklines; Links and Causal Arrows; Words, Numbers Images; Fundamental Principles of Analytic Design; Corruption in Evidence Presentations; Cognitive Style of PowerPoint; Sculptural Pedestals; and Landscape Sculptures) and, although all of the chapters are not uniformly strong (notably Sparklines and both of the Sculptures), two of them (Fundamental Principles and Corruption) are better than anything you could find anywhere else. It's content that you would want undergraduates to take away with them.
Beautiful Evidence is Tufte's greatest hits volume and last year I used it to teach table and figure making and even paper writing to undergraduate Digital Technology and Culture majors at Washington State University, emphasizing practice rather than theory. As in each of Tufte's books, figures, tables, maps, cartoons, paintings, photos, and illustrations from 1500 years of human history stand alongside one another to illustrate such design principles as to escape flatland by adding scales, diagrams, overlays, numbers, words, and images to make "mapped pictures" to document and present evidence, to skillfully use arrows to suggest cause, and to show skepticism whenever stumbling onto official reports that use the passive voice or the bullet-list format (pp.142-3).
Although I had taught Tufte's Envisioning Information to undergraduates for years, there were lessons for me in bringing Beautiful Evidence to a group of undergraduates, as there seemed to be a minority that despised Tufte for his standards, his moral imperative that evidence presentation is a moral act as well as an intellectual activity, and his emphasis on historical precedent--in short, things that all educators and librarians hold dear. One student called it "a picture book for adults" that contained commonsense stuff that everyone knew. And, although there may be some truth here, the good thing about Tufte is that he is all about showing the design principles that the world doesn't have to reinvent but simply carry forward.
Additionally, Beautiful Evidence has (at least) two other bonuses for undergraduate students, its comparison of PowerPoint with other methods of presenting information and its utter skewering of a book that presents a study of artists' paintings and value (pp.148-9) that was published by a Cambridge, MA publisher. Both offer great Tufte lessons. Energized undergraduates will argue against Tufte's condemnation of PowerPoint by saying that it is a more dynamic tool than Tufte makes it out to be because the "pitch" has a place in modern life. Tufte's skillful analysis of the study of artist's paintings (that illustrates a new term, economisting, with accents on the con and mist) will seem even more amazing after checking the book out over Amazon to discover all the favorable reviews associated with it.
Whether Beautiful Evidence is an introduction to Edward Tufte's work or simply the latest in a successful string of four books, readers will find something of interest. New readers will discover an explosion of beautiful, colorful-but-integrated content and seasoned readers will find what has come to be Tufte's style: a minimalist, no-nonsense text where the references are elevated to a place of honor along the right-hand side of the page and the images take center stage.
Book Review: More masterful examples of the same solid principles
Summary: 5 Stars
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 remember from the examples in Tufte's books that there may be a better way to communicate information, and that there may often be value or at least inspiration in perusing what really clever people have done with similar information in the past, rather than just applying a boilerplate graph to the problem.
The most useful specific things I have gotten from Beautiful Evidence so far have been the concept of sparklines to embed quantitatve context elegantly into text, the particularly cogent description of Tufte's general principles, and his detailed analysis of the "cognitive style" of bullet list presentations found so widely in presentations.
For those who, like me, never tire of seeing masterful examples of communicating technical information, are inspired by them to improve their own communications, and even find these examples beautiful as well as elegant, this book will be another very welcome and rewarding addition.
Book Review: Good But Content Diluted, Concept-Elucidation Blurred?
Summary: 2 Stars
Yes it is indeed a sad enterprise when an author--runs out of steam. Begins to repeat; begins to dilute. A near-universal in visual art, also in literature. Mark Twain's early travel books ran dynamic, rich--but then at least one later work slowed to show results of fatigue and the end of inspiration. We can call it an issue of Specific Gravity. What is the amount of material compared to the word-count? One speaks of "op-ed books" today, full-length treatments whose gist and essence could have been presented in, say, 1000 words.
Edward Tufte's invaluable first three books show this proportionate packing with material. Just possibly, this fourth and latest book--shows dilution, watering-down, inappropriate repetition. At least one other reviewer has made this point; I suspect so.
But let's accentuate the positives of Tufte's vision--even if imperfectly presented here. New here (among good stuff such as "sparklines") is the indispensable attempt at explicating universal principles of design. Above the Concrete Particulars, the flux of graphs, charts, pictures, etc., what Conceptual Principles can guide us? And the half-dozen issues he identifies, are helpful.
However, the presentation of them is not. Tufte employs Menard's famous graphic of Napoleon's 1811 Russian campaign to illustrate the principles. However, in terms of sheer Information Elucidation, two errors seem to occur.
First, number of examples. To convey difficult concept, more than one example, illustration, instance is needed. We lack a "rounded ensemble" (in my system's terminology) of several and varied instances to better cinch the point. Example: someone trying to convey the idea of a map as more than just an image of the earth's surface, of presenting knowledge, referenced chromosome maps in genetics, weather maps in meteorology, animal range maps in zoology, magnetic field maps in geology, and wiring diagrams in engineering. [Geographer Peter Gould is even better in elucidating how maps are not terrestrial but conceptual, representing relationships between things. He references "maps" of emotional states of married couples, South Pacific geobotanically, New Zealand "in changing aircost space," intellectual winds blowing through psychology journals, my gosh, world journalism, Shakespeare, influenza...] Bravo, a rounded ensemble cinches the concept with polypod footings. Too bad Tufte fell short here as the multiple instances ploy is actually similar to Tufte's own excellent tactic of "Small Multiples."
Second, comparison/contrast, or rather,Tufte's non-use of this keystone principle of thinking-writing-communicating. Only the excellent Menard graphic is shown; he should have either shown a bad attempt by another of the same subject, or created a "ruined" version also of Menard's, given a flawed example. This dualism for each of his universal principles. One thinks of Tufte's own dictum, statistics always asks, "compared to what?" Or, "He who knows not a foreign country knows nothing of his own." Or, to teach freshmen students good qualities of poetry, give a first draft or inferior poem on the same subject as well as Yeats' excellent final-draft "The Old Pensioner." Or give even a triad: as in, a too-lightly- inked graphic, a just-right density, and then an over-inked graphic.
So much for better elucidation of Key Principles. This is more important than the issue of irrelevant items, such as the issues of introductions and of sculptures. A little charity here; it's hard to exclude one's own enthusiasms. But Convergence to Point is also a principle of good communication.
"At least a quintet [of books] is projected," states Tufte. But let him await the wellspring re-filling itself with Heavy Water, not diluted dew. And please use comparison-contrast and multiple examples to cinch point.
Book Review: Not up to his standard; self-indulgent and disjointed
Summary: 3 Stars
Let me start on pages 148 and 149. What WAS Tufte thinking? The guru of visual presentation wishes to show us a point-by-point critique of a page of text. But it is laid out as a spread, with the page that is the subject of the critique placed in the center. Across the gutter! It's insulting to the page being critiqued, which I guess is OK. But the points he is making depend on the reader actually being able to _read_ that page. Placing it across the gutter is insulting to the _reader._ The high-quality Smyth-sewn binding might be capable of taking the stress of making the spread lie flat, but it wasn't a risk I cared to take with a brand-new book. I wrote this off as an anomaly until pages 164 and 165, where he does it _again._
_Everyone_ should read "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information," and "Envisioning Information" and "Visual Explanations" are worthy successors. This, unfortunately, isn't.
It's disjointed. It reads like a collection of unconnected articles. At least one chapter, "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint," has already been published separately. There's nothing wrong with publishing a collection of articles, but this book pretends to be a coherent book on a single subject, "Beautiful Evidence."
It's self-indulgent. After eight chapters dealing with visual presentation of facts, we suddenly come across a chapter about the role of pedestals in sculpture and a photo album of Tufte's own sculptures. Perhaps these are beautiful, but are they evidence? Do these sculptures present quantitative information or help us think about it?
It's pretentious. There is a chapter on "sparklines." He jumps in with an example--fair enough. But he then utters the ex cathedra passive-voice statement, "These little data lines, because of their active quality over time, are named 'sparklines'--small, high-resolution graphics usually embedded in a full context of words, numbers, images." On reading this chapter, I was honestly confused at first. I read it as meaning "sparklines" were an accepted terminology for a current practice, and that he was going to talk about good and bad designs for them, where to use them, do's and don't. It took me some head-scratching and a few double-takes before concluding that it is a neologism which he invented, and that he _wishes_ they were commonly used.
Why didn't he start off modestly, saying something like this: "My colleagues and I have been experimenting with a presentation technique we call 'sparklines.' These are miniature, unlabeled graphs inserted inline into text. They present far more information than a number or word without taking up much more space. In this chapter, I hope I can convince you to consider using sparklines where appropriate. I also hope to show that small graphics inline with text have a venerable history and deserve to be used far more often than they are?"
Of course the book has many wonderful things in it and is well worth having. But Tufte could have used an editor.
Book Review: Perhaps the best of a superb series
Summary: 5 Stars
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.