"It's all about the content. Get better content or use sparklines". Edward Tufte

Yesterday I went to Edward Tufte's one-day course on data visualization: Presenting data and information (http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/courses).

I am sharing below some rough take home notes I took:

• New methods of presenting will be sans PowerPoint. Provide readings, discuss, and explain with visuals as you go along.
• Get better content
• Use sparklines. Sparklines are datawords: data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics. They have applications for financial and economic data by tracking changes over time. Sparklines also reduce recency bias and may aid in better decision making (it was one of the first times I hear about a bias termed "recency"). You can easily create sparklines using excel, the sparkline feature was added in Microsoft excel 2010. I created my sparkline satisfaction rate with Tufte's style and lecture over the course of the day (Figure).

  

  Data points varied over the course of the day. The First data point was 8.89 at 10:15 am and my last data point was 9.99 at 16:15 pm. The lowest point is highlighted in red because the course stopped and I had to go find food. The highest point is highlighted in green because the course ended 2 minutes early and satisfaction was high given the feeling of wanting more. Galileo and Euclid were also mentioned which also contributed to a higher satisfaction, given my fascination in both. Note that this is just an example to illustrate a sparkline, satisfaction is subjective. Also Tufte strongly encouraged links to raw data so I am pasting the original table at the end.
  
  
  
   

  
  

 

• The way to explain complicated data is by means of annotation
• Show comparisons and show a lot of them
• Document your sources and provide links to your data
• You need to be involved in the initial moment of data collection
• When you have something you really want to learn about use Google Images first.Visual solutions for visual problems: Search Google Images.
• There are six principles of data visualization and analytical design. One of the best statistical graphics ever is Joseph Minard's data-map describing the successive losses in men of the French army during the French invasion of Russia in 1812. Tufte includes this graphic in his book titled "beautiful evidence" and his 6 principles are described through this map (pages 123-139):
• Comparisons: Smart comparisons is what statistics is all about: Show comparisons,contrasts, and differences.
• Causality, mechanism, structure, explanation
• Multivariate analysis: 3 or more dimensions, 3 or more variables, 3 or more factors
• Integration of evidence: Segregation information by mode of production completely integrate words, numbers, images, diagrams
• Documentation: Credibility, quality control for integrity and data links
• Content counts most of all
• The seventh principle, Tufte mentioned to add, would be: For anything important, try to show information adjacent to space. The more the resolution the better.
• Screens are flat but the world is not. Euclidean's plane and the three dimensional space of Euclidean geometry as spaces of dimensions two and three. Use 3-dimensional images whenever you can.
• One of the first beautiful illustrations were by Galileo in his book published in 1613. In it he discusses the discovery of the rings of Saturn, the Human Eye, and the four satellites of Jupiter. Tufte described Galileo as one of the best information "displayers" ever. His use of extremely expensive engravings with high resolution allowed the transmission of knowledge about the rotation of the sun and the active sun spots.
• The best visualizations in the world are those of scientific research published in the Journal Nature.

Tufte's books (References and readings):
  

Raw Data Table for Sparkline Satisfaction with Tufte's course

Time                           Satisfaction
10:15                                8.89
10:45                                8.91
11:15                                8.92
11:45                                8.96
12:15                                9.12
12:45                                9.35
13:15                                8.51
13:45                                8.61
14:15                                9.12
14:45                                9.35
15:15                                9.68
15:45                                9.89
16:15                                9.99