Beautiful Evidence by Edward R. Tufte Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Beautiful Evidence
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.
Book Review: Quick Service
Summary: 5 Stars
The book reached very quickly to India from the US. Amazing.
Thanks to Amazon.
Nagesh
Book Review: Recycled? No problem!
Summary: 5 Stars
I for one am the opposite of the people who read this and, as fans of Tufte's other works, felt let down. There seem to be a lot of complaints about recycled material. Yes, a lot of stuff in here is found in his other books. Yes, his whole Cognitive Style of PowerPoint pamphlet is reproduced here (I think?). No, I don't think that's a problem and in fact I think this is his best work ever.
I once owned Tufte's other three books, but sold them. They had no use to me, I found them to be a bit too... fluffy. But I picked up Beautiful Evidence and thought I had struck gold. A lot of his great ideas are concentrated, and yeah there's some fluff but he saves it for the end, where it belongs. I have actually put this book to serious, heavy use, which I cannot say for any of Tufte's other works.
Is this review helpful to all of you possible buyers? Probably not. If you loved his other works, you are likely to feel some disappointment at spending forty five bucks or so on stuff you already have. But if you didn't like Tufte before (and I know there's plenty of you out there) you might find a reason to now. It seems as if this is Tufte's way of streamlining his really good ideas for maximum usage. With a little fluff tossed in, of course.
Book Review: Showing evidence is hard!
Summary: 5 Stars
ET is superb in showing the goods and the bads of showing facts in graphics (and text too: both combine to give the best result). Designers and Information Architects should all sleep with this book over their pillow, in order to take a grasp everytime a single turn in bed is needed... Specially those working for magazines and newspapers, which make so many mistakes in a single info-graphics (the NYT is an exception to this horror trend...).
I would highlight the Map on Losses of Napolean Troops. Read the explanation. Then copy it in a big format and hang it on the wall. The double page of the Shuttle's disaster is also a must.
Above all, this makes us, who just fire e-mails (some of them carrying a 'document' value), so small, in the sense that we have so much to learn still...
Thank you, ET!