PatternExon

Visual Explanations – Edward Tufte

// March 9th, 2007 // books, reading, review

This is a continuum of my new found obsession with Graphs and Visual representation in general. The irony is that the more books I read the more important I think it is for one to able to visualize data as knowledge. Of late,there have been many instances where the way I studied a table of data for twenty minutes was pathetic to what others could see in the same data, same table just by a glance. So, in a general sense of reverse engineering the art of visualization this my second read. Tufte is a master of design – of exploiting dimensions. creating dimensions. The front cover is a great example where Tufte takes the pictorial representation of a Cyclone drawn by the National Weather Service & transforms it into  a better – simpler, easier & fuller representation. Awesome. What I have realized though, is that this isnt something that could be delivered as a Five Point Mantra of Fabulous Map Making, one has to look at a lot of graphs to know how to make good graphs. Also one has to idiot-proof their graphs & this takes a lot of time. Theres another example where he takes graphs drawn by NASA & its partners and demystifies them such that the trend is impossible to dismiss. Am still planning to lay my hands on the latest of Tufte delights.