I was fortunate to be able to attend Presenting Data and Visualization yesterday. It did NOT disappoint. Perhaps the greatest part is the fact you get all four of his books while attending. Those things are full of great tips and impactful knowledge. Can’t wait to dig deeper into those. His presentation was part about data but also half about giving presentations. I’ll try to summarize everything I learned in the workshop.
Tufte, perhaps famously now, has a specific meeting style. I say famously because it was implemented by Jeff Bezos and Amazon. His style includes setting the first minutes of the meeting to be a study hall with reading material relevant to the meeting. He suggests 5 minutes for every page. This study hall covers the most important content of the meeting.
He is surely famous for his disdain of the PowerPoint slide deck. In fact, he refers to PowerPoint as an almighty, dictator. See cartoonish picture.
A lot of his claims include the idea that space matters And being able to see information adjacently is powerful. PowerPoint has data spaced unadjacently and moving in time. PowerPoint also forces the audience to be told what to learn and doesn’t let them explore their interests Like the study hall would
anyway, we started with a study hall from his books during which we read about his appreciation for content full charts that have all “chart-junk” removed. Tufte has perhaps a unique thought of visualization and that is you should stuff as much information as you can. Others have a thought of only include one feature, keep it simple, sleek, ect. Not Tufte. He claims there is no correlation between understanding of a graph and how much content there is. He also says “almost always the things of importance in the world are multivariate” and claims we should hence show them multivariate. I love that because I think there are a lot of creative ways to show more dimensions.
Tufte loves to talk about Maynard’s March of Napolean. It’s heralded as perhaps the greatest graphic of all time.
On a 2-dimensional space, Maynard was able to show geographic location (both x and y), size of army, direction of army, time, and temperature. Six freaking dimensions! Tufte also loves the documentation and text that accompanies the graph explains the chart and what it means. He loves the paragraph form.
Another large contribution of Tufte is his invention of spark lines. He discovered a graph doesn’t need to take up a lot of space to have informational impact. In fact, he found he could jam a whole lot of information in a small space through spark lines. He could even put these graphs inline if paragraphs as a sentence or word.
Sparklines have truly become an integral part of any dashboard with large data.
He talked a surprisingly large amount about Google
Maps which he sees as the current industry leader in information display. He claims Their ability to show 6 layers of data flawlessly is a triumph. If you think about it, they have the satellite image which captures a lot. But on top of that, overlaid, they have streets, highways, and freeways, places to eat, places to see, grocery stores, water taxi paths, pretty much everything. When displaying data, Google Maps is the golden standard.