CityReads| 5 Classic books on Data Visualization by Edward Tufte

Edward Tufte 城读 2022-07-13

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5 Classic books on Data Visualization by Edward Tufte

Edward Tufte is revolutionizing how we see data.

Sources:

https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/

https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/mayjune-2011/the-information-sage/

Several days ago, Max Roser, the founder of the website Our World in Data, asked people to recommend the best books on data visualization. The same name always came up in the enthusiastic responses: Edward Tufte. So I search and find his website, books and courses.

Edward Tufte is a statistician and artist, and Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Statistics, and Computer Science at Yale University. He has taught over 300,000 practitioners in the science and art of presenting data and information. He wrote, designed, and self-published 5 classic books on data visualization. The New York Times described ET as the "Leonardo da Vinci of data," and Bloomberg as the "Galileo of graphics."

While you may not have heard of Edward Tufte, you may have seen the Flow Map of Napoleon's Russian Campaign of 1812, which has been hailed as the best statistical graphic of all time. It owes this reputation largely to Tufte, who published his first book, The Visual Representation of Quantitative Information, in 1983, in which he analyzes and explains why this map is probably the best statistical chart ever made.

Flow Map of Napoleon’s Russian Campaign of 1812

This map is War and Peace as told by a visual Tolstoy. The map is about the size of a car window, and follows the French invasion of Russia in 1812. It was drawn in 1869 by a French engineer named Charles Joseph Minard. On the left of the map, on the banks of the Niemen River, near Kovno in modern-day Lithuania, a horizontal tan stripe represents the initial invasion force of 420,000 French soldiers. As they march east, toward Moscow to the right, on the map they begin to die, and the stripe narrows.

The map itself is elegant and restrained, but it tells the story of a sprawling, bloody horror: cold and hunger begin to finish off whatever French soldiers the Russians haven’t killed in battle. As the French army retreats, the tan line turns black and doubles back on itself to the left, or to the west, away from Moscow. A series of thin gray lines intersect the path of the army, showing the winters cruel temperatures. On November 9 it is 9 degrees below freezing. On November 14, it is 21 degrees below.

Then, on the 28th of November, a catastrophe: in a rush to cross the Berezina River, half of the retreating army, 22,000 men, drowns in the rivers icy waters. The black line, already thinned to a fraction of its initial size, abruptly reduces by half. Finally, in late December, six months after they set off, the surviving French soldiers cross back over the Niemen River. The map shows their number: 10,000 men.

Minard's graphic tells a rich, coherent story with its multivariate data, far more enlightening than just a single number bouncing along over time. Six variables are plotted: the size of the army, its location on a two-dimensional surface, direction of the army's movement, and temperature on various dates during the retreat from Moscow.

Tufte introduced a reverence for math and science to the discipline and, in turn, codified the rules that would create a new one, which has come to be called, alternatively, information design or analytical design. His is often the authoritative word on what makes a good chart or graph, and over the years his influence has changed the way places like the Wall Street Journal and NASA display data. Tufte has shifted how designers approach the job of turning information into understanding. It’s not about making the complex simple. It’s about making the complex clear.

Tufte has self-published five books. His books feel unattached from any time or place. They are anachronistic in their images, styling, and soft-beige paper, as if dropped into the present from a vague and altogether more genteel past.

1. The visual display of quantitative information, 2001, second edition

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information came out in April 1983. To save costs, Tufte told the printer to bind only half of the initial print run of 5,000 copies. The book is now in its twentieth printing, and is one of the most successful self-published books of all time. It has become the classic book on statistical graphics, charts, tables.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is about pictures of numbers, how to depict data and enforce statistical honesty. The first part of this book reviews the graphical practice of the two centuries since Playfair. The reader will, I hope, rejoice in the graphical glories shown in Chapter 1 and then condemn the lapses and lost opportunities exhibited in Chapter 2. Chapter 3, on graphical integrity and sophistication, seeks to account for these differences in quality of graphical design.

The second part of the book provides a language for discussing graphics and a practical theory of data graphics. Applying to most visual displays of quantitative information, the theory leads to changes and improvements in design, suggests why some graphics might be better than others, and generates new types of graphics. The emphasis is on maximizing principles, empirical measures of graphical performance, and the sequential improvement of graphics through revision and editing. Insights into graphical design are to be gained, I believe, from theories of what makes for excellence in art, architecture, and prose.

2. Envisioning information, 1990

If Tufte’s first book was a critique, his second was a manifesto. Envisioning Information, published in 1990, implored readers to think of information design as a discipline that encompassed far more than the charts, tables, and other purely quantitative forms that had traditionally dominated the field. Graphics aren’t just useful for displaying numbers, in other words, but for clarifying just about anything one person is trying to tell someone else. The book opens with a print of a visitor’s guide to the Ise shrine in Japan and ends around 120 pages later with Galileo’s drawing of the rings of Saturn from 1613.

Envisioning Information is about pictures of nouns (maps and aerial photographs, for example, consist of a great many nouns lying on the ground). Envisioning also deals with visual strategies for design: color, layering, and interaction effects. This book celebrates escapes from the flatlands of both paper and computer screen, showing superb displays of high-dimensional complex data.

3. Visual explanations: images and quantities, evidence and narrative, 1997

Visual Explanations is about pictures of verbs, the representation of mechanism and motion, of process and dynamics, of causes and effects, of explanation and narrative. Since such displays are often used to reach conclusions and make decisions, there is a special concern with the integrity of the content and the design. Practical applications and examples include statistical graphics, charts for making important decisions in engineering and medicine, technical manuals, diagrams, design of computer interfaces and websites and on-line manuals, animations and scientific visualizations, techniques for talks, and design strategies for enhancing the rate of information transfer in print, presentations, and computer screens.

4. Beautiful Evidence, 2006

Beautiful Evidence, is filled with hundreds of illustrations from the worlds of art and science. It contains historical maps and diagrams as well as contemporary charts and graphs. In one chapter alone, there's an 18th-century depiction of how to do a cross-section drawing of how a bird's wing works, and photos from a 1940s instruction book for skiing. They all demonstrate one concept: Good design is timeless, while bad design can be a matter of life and death.

Tufte proposes 6 principles of analytical design in this book: comparisons; causality, mechanism, structure, explanation; multivariate analysis; integration of evidences; documentation; content counts most of all.

5. Seeing with fresh eyes: meaning, space, data, truth, 2021

The book is timely. Tufts spends a considerable amount of real estate on health care data. Vaccine efficacy visuals, checklists in surgery, data integrity in medical research, financial conflict in healthcare, and much more. Tufte shares multiple examples related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Most influential, however, was a chart sharing information on Measles cases before and after vaccinations were available in the USA.

It is not that Tufte designs the world's most beautiful visuals; instead, he shares them (from Leonardo da Vinci, Marie Curie, Walt Disney, Joseph Heller, and dozens of other not-so-famous authors). He helpfully annotates them, helping us understand what makes the visuals so appealing and informative. Never has more data permeated our lives. Tufte's ability to interpret these data and information - to see with "Fresh Eyes" - is invigorating.

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