THE VISUAL DISPLAY OF QUANTITATIVE INFORMATION - EDWARD R. TUFTE

S/O to Ed Tufte for writing the same book twice. A few weeks ago, I read and reviewed ENVISIONING INFORMATION and was taken. It was a pretty amazing and interesting book and as a physical object, it is really a top-10 book. TVDOQI is very much the same book. Tufte walks you through his personal theories and rules about how data should be displayed and reprints tons of examples to comment on. This book, TVDOQI, is slightly different in that it includes a historical element. Did you know one person, named William Playfair invented the bar graph, the line graph, the pie graph and the area graph? And he was also a spy? Weird stuff. Though Tufte wisely doesn’t get bogged down in the history of graphical representation, the rest of this book is just like EI, is a series of succinct, precise bits of advice and lots of beautifully produced examples. Here’s a sampling of some of the advice:

“It is no accident, since the relational graphic- in its barest form, the scatterplot and its variants- is the greatest of all graphical designs.”

“Graphical excellence is the well-designed presentation of interesting data- a matter of substance, of statistics, and of design.”

“Graphical excellence is that which gives the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space.”

”The best graphics are about the useful and important, about life and death, about the universe. Beautiful graphics do not traffic in the trivial.” 

“And graphical excellence requires telling the truth about data.”

As you can see from the quotes, especially the last two, this book is a bit of time capsule. Written in ‘83, the book is sort of perched right at the edge of the loathsomely named “Information Age” where the amount of “data” and graphical representations of this data is orders of magnitude larger than when he wrote this. And it thinks people rightfully are suspicious of “large data '' and its ability to lie and manipulate. I guess it seems naive, sitting in 2020, to think that there is an agreed upon “truth” at the heart of a data set. Otherwise, there’s an interesting section at the front about how he, Tufte, left a lot of money on the table to design the book himself with a typesetter and thus make sure the book, as an object, was up to the standards he’s defending in the book. It turned out to be a great investment and puts this series in that rare category with 1000 PLATEAUS as books that are themselves examples of the thing the book is about. There’s also a surprising amount of Robert Venturi in the book; Tufte sees himself doing for graphics what Venturi did for architecture. He even steals his “Duck” criticism, calling out, “the We-Used-A-Computer-To-Build-A-Duck Syndrome.” Finally, he’s consistent about “data” being plural which you almost never see. You end up with sentences like, ”Aren’t data interesting?“ which are impressively pedantic. 1790 Graphs