Getting Your Point Across

Edward Tufte, a statistician who is best known for his work on "information design" and the visual presentation of quantitative data, is soon to release his fourth major book on those topics, Beautiful Evidence. (A sample chapter appears now on his website.) The book, like its predecessors, is sure to be valuable and even compelling examination of how to thoughtfully present information using various visual techniques, especially when those presentations are intended to complement traditional prose.

Reading Tufte as a historian, writer, and teacher, I'm impressed and inspired by his willing aptitude for striking a balance between "words and images." (See page 5 of the sample chapter for a stunning historical example.) Tufte thus stands apart from quant zealots who can't imagine (and aren't capable) of presenting information through the written word, and, worse, those who can't do much better with images.

To that end, Tufte has lately focused on the business world's penchant for visual presentations, which are endemic and almost universally awful. In 2003, for instance, he published a brilliant polemic against "slideware," a pamphlet entitled "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint." (There's a sample of his argument on Wired magazine's website.) In that piece and in Beautiful Evidence, he inveighs against the information-technology practice of "segregating evidence by mode (word, number, image, graph)," when "a good system of evidence display should be centered on documents, not on a collection of application programs each devoted to a single mode of information... The unfortunate current-day practice of segregation of information by its mode of production should not become a metaphor for evidence presentations. Why should the intellectual architecture of our reports reflect the chaos of the computer bureaucracy producing the reports?" (All quotes from p. 17 of draft chapter.)

Why, indeed? Bill Gates, thou hath sinned! Wrestling every day with a half-dozen loosely interconnected but often warring Windows applications at work, I would love an answer to Tufte's question. (As a historian, I would propose that the distinctions among kinds of information has everything to do with professionalization in capitalist economies.) I see that Apple has wondered, too, and is actually taking steps to abolish those distinctions with its new "Pages" application, which purports to allow a user to create all sorts of documents without having to jump back and forth between Word, Excel, Access, and other apps. The proof will be in the pudding, but I'm eager to see how it works and to try to follow the great Tufte's dicta.