Beautiful Evidence by Edward R. Tufte Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Beautiful Evidence
Book Review: A disappointment
Summary: 2 Stars
I finished tufte last night... what a disaster, or perhaps sunk with high expectations.
I'm a huge fan of dr. tufte's very influential writing on information visualization - as far as I know he's done the best work in the field. But this book - while simply physically and visually stunning - is a real disappointment.
In this work I read about 20% insight, 40% recycled material and preaching to what is probably the choir (this includes an overly repetitious chapter-long discussion of minard's lovely march to moscow graphic & his previously available power point piece), and 40% filler & drek. I don't find his comments on art, writing styles, baseball, and the like to be terribly compelling, and are certainly done better in many other works - and indeed, his thoughts on these ended up as being pretty grating and condescending, if not just wrong.
And that the book ends with several pages of photos (a few of really poor quality, I might add) his own outdoor artwork (which are of passable quality, but what the *bleep* does this have to do with evidence as defined at the front of the book?) only throws salt on the wounds.
This thing is maddeningly inconsistent. I wish I could simply dismiss the work, but it's full of beauty and joy as well as the bad. Sparklines are fun, but could be improved on. Words + images combined inline, some great stuff there. But while some of the really lovely things, like the translations of galileo, are wonderful and exciting to any science-loving person, they really are pretty pointless to the conversation at hand. He has gone straight down since his first major book - a 5+ star effort, the 2nd, 4.5-5 stars, 3rd, 3 stars, and this is about a 2 star one (2.5+ if you haven't read the others.)
If he'd stop believing his sycophants and stop taking himself so seriously in his quest to convince the reader that he's a high priest on a moral crusade it'd be wonderful. He really does try to convince the reader that this topic is of high moral concern - not just sometimes, but in general. I don't buy it.
And you shouldn't buy this if you haven't read his other works (although if you haven't I'll admit you'll probably like this, you just don't know any better ;-)). Read the staggeringly good "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" or the wonderful "Envisioning Information". And if you must read this, soak up the good points, and try not to grind your teeth with the rest.
Book Review: A great guide for what to do with high-resolution display devices
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Book Review: A worthwhile read, if you have time to take it all in...
Summary: 4 Stars
Beautiful Evidence
The book goes to great lengths to explain the power and impact of visual imagery on the human mind. This type of psychological information can be valuable for many people in many different fields of expertise. The amount that it covers can be a bit over-bearing if you want to look at specifics to your own specific requirement, best to let it "wash over you" and distill out the key elements of interest afterwards. An interesting book...
Book Review: Amusing but not useful
Summary: 2 Stars
Tufte's work is fun to look at, thought provoking, opinionated, and not usually very practical to apply. This book was a bit disappointing. The preachy section on power point was annoying and unhelpful, since many of us do have to present structured talks and cannot compose a Lincoln speech or create graphics like Pravda. A chapter about how to use powerpoint creatively and effectively would be more useful than an anti-Microsoft diatribe and read almost like a conspiracy theory.Book Review: Another Amazing Tufte Publication
Summary: 5 Stars
This is yet another amazing Tufte publication. Consistent with Tufte's earlier publications, this book is composed beautifully, in terms of the quality of paper stock, ink and clarity. The book is as much a work of art as a treatise on the principles of evidence and analytical design.
"Beautiful Evidence" codifies a number of principles laid out in earlier Tufte publications, such as those of analytical design, as well as extends Tufte's unique perspective into topics such as Sparklines.
For those interested in optimizing the presentation of information...and recognizing when information may be presented in a manner that should raise questions and concerns, there is no better source than Dr. Edward Tufte, in my opinion.
I attended one of Dr. Tufte's day-long seminars a number of years ago and found his "in person" explanation of presenting and interpreting information to be exceptionally good. As such, I highly recommend both this book and Dr. Tufte's seminar to all readers.