Guus Bosman

Today I attended a seminar by Edward Tufte: Presenting Data and Information. Mr. Tufte is a professor at Yale and is an expert in the field of data visualization. I read about him in last year's Christmas edition of The Economist and I've used his website in the past.

Mr. Tufte is in the Triangle today and tomorrow, and the course was in a small conference center near the airport. We received a package with four of his books and the course was build around sections of the books. The course touched on a large variety of topics and we saw many example graphs and videos. I especially liked his idea of sparklines, embedded high-resolution graphs embedded in regular text. For example, the US deficit from 1980 to 2003 looked like (not very good, in other words).

Mr. Tufte brought an original first edition of a book by Galileo, more than 400 years old, and a while later he did a review of the iPhone. An important point of view that I learned today is: adding detail to add clarity. "Simplifying" information by leaving things out or abbreviating them, does no justice to the smartness of human audiences. If a diagram or a picture is cluttered, you're first action should not be to start leaving out data, but to reevaluate your design of the diagram or picture.

It was a very inspirational day and I'm looking forward to read the books.