I wouldn't feel right with what the blog has been about lately if Graphjam.com wasn't mentioned. Run by the LoLcatz guys, i find this site addicting and some of the graphs pretty brilliant. Check it out.

So I have to ask what the book Beautiful Evidence means to those who are creating and distributing information online?  Looking at one of my previous posts on the redesign of Facebook, I can say quite a lot. The internet has provided us with unending information, but anyone who has ever read a brochure made in MS Word will know, if the information is not presented in an appealing way, it is useless.

The web at its core is still running on a system that was developed decades ago.  Pages have text on them and use links to link to other pages. This worked back in the 90's, but not today.  The invention of more dynamic technologies like java, css, and flash have given designers all they need to make virtually anything. Slowly as the pages of the web became more like the pages of a book, designers replicated what was familiar, but it is slowly becoming is own.

I remember back when Flash was first gaining steam, a teacher of mine made the class recite this line, "Flash is important, because it brings or designs time".  Elements of data could move and change without the user doing a single thing.

A large part of the Facebook update is moving it into a real-time fluid stream. Mashable wrote about why this design choice was made.  It is a choice made to engage the Facebook users in the way that twitter users are, the information finds them, they don't find it.

Eventually, it seems we are heading towards a completely connected web, where we will sit as a march of information flows towards us.  Pictures, diagrams, writing, news stories, and videos will all seemlessly find those interested in them. Sites like digg, reddit, twitter, and facebook are getting there, but whatever comes after them will be truly beautiful.

     I just stumbled on an interesting page on the wired.com website.  It's not just any site actually; it's a wiki.  The purpose of the wiki is to help make relevant government documents more easily accessible for anyone who wishes to see them. 

     The goals of the wiki range from reasonable, such as converting the documents out of pdf and lotus files (which apparently, are terrible, from what I gathered), to pie-in-the-sky.  Wired's hopes on the possibility of making all government data available fall into the latter category.  The wiki says, "We agree with the Sunlight Foundation's Greg Elin that the single most important thing any government agency could do to make itself more transparent would be to create a data catalog of all its data streams."  Good luck with that. 

     Still, the wiki does promote some far-reaching and seemingly helpful changes.  For one, the site advocates making transparency "the rule, and not the exception." Along the same lines, these advocates are also suggesting that agencies that do make their data public for research be rewarded in some way for allowing their work to help others.  This is an especially pressing matter for scientists. 

     Wired hopes to use their wiki as a mediator between the government and citizens.  Also, based on research by the community, Wired hopes to get a feel for what types of data its users are more interested in accessing.  I did not pick up on whether the government is willing or able to work with the magazine, but the wiki is a valuable resources nonetheless.  Aside from serving as a useful primer for some of the issues related to accessing government data, the wiki also provides several links to companies such as Sunlight Foundation whose goal is to make government data usable. 

    This made me think of Communities of Practice by Ettiene Wenger.  We have several entities--the website, its users, and the various firms whose goal is make government data accessible-- working together for a common goal.  Drawing on the varied and dispersed expertise of journalists, experts, and the public, we are witness to a beneficial use of Web 2.0 technology.  May the folks at Wired be successful with their goals. 
    

Having re-read Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence, I’ve found the text more accessible the second time around, but there are still some concepts I’m grabbling with.  (These may be the very points Tufte is reinforcing, and so I’m still missing the mark.)

 

The concept I’m struggling with most is reconciling the perspective that inevitably skews any document an author (or artist) constructs with the concept of “evidence.”  I’m not clear on exactly what Tufte is defining as evidence in this book.  (Can we discuss this further in class?)  We speak often on how truth is a concept that is readily transferable and, in essence, non-existent.  So what is Tufte ultimately looking to achieve through his reflections on the graphics in this text?

 

Early in the text, Tufte explains the problems caused when mapping serves as evidence, using the example of linking ancient monuments and astronomical phenomena, as “confirming alignments will pleasingly lock right into place if the desired answer is already known” (29).  He follows claiming that mappings “become more credible if constructed independently from a favored result” (29).  But is it ever possible to establish the disconnect that would be required to make an (authentic?) documentation independent of motive?

 

Perhaps Tufte is calling readers to recognize this very point.  In discussing sparklines, Tufte claims, “Providing a straightforward and contextual look at intense evidence, sparkline graphics give us some chance to be approximately right rather than exactly wrong” (63).  My question is at what tolerance?  I think part of Tufte’s point in the distribution of sparklines is that they create suggestions, or ideas, that lead readers to draw conclusions as well as ask further questions about the existing arrangement, thereby causing us to think beyond the information before us.

It has been nearly a year since I first read Beautiful Evidenceby Edward Tufte. My initial reaction to the chapter “Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” was similar to the reactions of my classmates who recently read Tufte for the first time—Power Point is evil. Tufte does come off as abrasive in regards to PowerPoint; however, Tufte suggests PowerPoint does have a practical use, but its use should be restricted in the data intense fields of the corporate and bureaucratic world.  The PowerPoint program has many limitations, which makes it impractical to use effectively in creating beautiful evidence out of complex data and information.

There are other programs that can create better evidence for data intense or complex information than PowerPoint. Programs like Adobe Flash and various web 2.0 applications, such as Voicethread. I think Tufte wants you to utilize the best program for the material you need to present. That may be PowerPoint if your material is simple and straightforward, but if your material is more complex, PowerPoint probably is not the best choice.

When reading Beautiful Evidence by Edward Tufte I came a crossed an interview that he gave about his book as well as many of the issues that he mentions in his other works.  I have included one of the many parts that was relevant to Information Architecture, however the entire interview is worth reading. 

 

TCQ: You have a new book coming out this year: Beautiful Evidence. Could you tell us about this project and its relationship to your earlier work?

 

Tufte: The title represents what I have been thinking about for seven or eight years now—issues of scientific evidence and issues of beauty. The leading edge in evidence presentation is in science; the leading edge in beauty is in high art. To see the future of analytical design, read Nature and Science, which routinely publish the remarkable visual work of practicing scientists (who have enormous amounts of data, who are bright and well funded, and who often have something to tell the world). Beautiful Evidence follows a growing concern in my work: assessing the quality of evidence and of finding out the truth. The other side is that sometimes displays of evidence have, as a byproduct, extraordinary beauty. I mean beautiful here in two senses: aesthetic or pretty but also amazing, wonderful, powerful, never before seen. In emphasizing evidential quality and beauty, I also want to move the practices of analytical design far away from the practices of propaganda, marketing, graphic design, and commercial art. The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly—

to develop strategies of seeing and showing. This seeing is not about “Aren’t these pictures of molecules beautiful?” Rather, the point is to recognize the tightness between seeing and thinking on an intellectual level not just a metaphorical level. That tightness is expressed in the very physiology of the eye: the retina is made from brain cells; the brain begins at the back of the eye. Seeing turns into thinking right there.

 

TCQ: How does this connection between seeing and thinking play itself out in Beautiful Evidence?

 

Tufte: Beautiful Evidence is about the theory and practice of analytical design. The purpose of analytical displays of evidence is to assist thinking. Consequently, in constructing displays of evidence, the first question is, “What are the thinking tasks that these displays are supposed to serve?” The central claim of the book is that effective analytic designs entail turning thinking principles into seeing principles. So, if the thinking task is to understand causality, the task calls for a design principle: “Show causality.” If a thinking task is to answer a question and compare it with alternatives, the design principle is: “Show

comparisons.” The point is that analytical designs are not to be decided on their convenience to the user or necessarily their readability or what psychologists or decorators think about them; rather, design

architectures should be decided on how the architecture assists analytical thinking about evidence.

In the book, I lay out eight principles of analytic design that derive from this theoretical base, and then I show how these principles lead to a set of new designs and favorite old designs that try to set standards for most all evidence displays. The book includes displays called sparklines/wordgraphs, a new way to show time series data. There is also material on an old idea now called mapped images, as well as displays on parallel mapping, causal arrow-linking lines, cladistic diagrams, and evolutionary trees. There are ideas about how time series, flow charts, and all scientific images should be redone. Another long chapter concerns rhetorical ploys in evidence presentations—ploys such as saying, “Our results are conservative” or “Our results are significant at the .000001 level”—a kind of self-congratulation by the researcher. There are probably about twenty of these rhetorical ploys.

 

 

            Overall I found this interview to be very interesting.  Tufte is thorough with his responses which gave a level of background information to his book.  This contextual information, I found to be very helpful in understanding Beautiful Evidence.   It was also interesting to learn more about his reasoning behind the topics that he chose to cover in Beautiful Evidence and why he chose to self publish the book.  The interview also discusses topics that were not present in this book but were in his other works. 

 

Zachry, M., Thralls. C. An Interview with Edward R. Tufte.  Technical Communication Quarterly, 13(4), 447–462.